


Garden of the Broken

by Snyffles



Series: The Chronicles of Bloodstar Manor [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst, Complicated Relationships, Drama & Romance, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Relationships, Incest, LGBTQ, M/M, Multi, Muses, Original Characters - Freeform, Rape, Sexual Content, Slow Romance, Supernatural Elements, Tragedy, Twisted, Unhealthy Relationships, Vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-11-13
Packaged: 2020-01-07 05:01:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 45,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18403622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snyffles/pseuds/Snyffles
Summary: Rori "The Red King" O'Connor never intended for his home, Bloodstar Manor, to become a sanctuary for teenage pariahs, but when one's lover is a half-incubus with a heart of gold, the word "no" quickly becomes a rarity.Jason Riley, an eighteen year old muse with amnesia, is one such case to have wound up on the Manor's doorstep. A muse with no memories, no history to speak of, and a master who can no longer afford to house him, Jason was sent to Bloodstar Manor in the hopes that it would aid him in finding a place for himself in a world saturated with the supernatural. Instead, he's found himself inadvertently attracting the insatiable attention of the Manor's Master - for while the Red King is cultured and poised, he is not without deeply-etched flaws. The soul behind the Red King's gilded mask has been broken by both time and tragedy, but even so, he soon places his heart and, indeed, his very life in Jason's hands as restitution...But can Jason find it within himself to acknowledge the man within the monster? Or will the scars of their pasts merely hasten their destruction as the Void looms, ever-larger, on the horizon?





	1. Prologue

** The Chronicles of Bloodstar Manor **

**Garden of the Broken**

_Lost? Confused? Read Me._

If you’re reading this, I’m betting you have no idea where you are, where you _were,_ or how you got here. And if you take a minute to think about it, you probably don’t know _who_ you are, either. Try it. What are the names of your parents? Do you have any siblings? Where do you live? And most importantly: What’s your name? When were you born? Without looking in a mirror, what colour are your eyes?

Don’t know? That’s okay. Don’t panic. That’s why I’m here. I… am you. Well, I _was_ you, before you forgot. Don’t believe me? You’re (probably) wearing a set of dog tags. Go ahead and check. All of that information? Yeah, that’s us. At least, that’s what’s _known_ about us. That’s what we’ve made of us. Still don’t get it? I don’t blame you, so let me try to explain. 

“Normal”… It’s never really come up as one of the many colorful adjectives to describe my day-to-day existence. Then again, even if my life ever _has_ been normal, I – and by extension, you, being me – wouldn’t remember it, and that is just one of the various reasons as to why I’m going on this rant in the first place.

The long and short of it is this: I can’t remember anything that happened before I was sixteen years old. I can’t remember anything before the day I woke up in a hospital I didn’t recognize with bandages on my wrists, and a complete stranger sprawled out and dozing in the chair next to my bed.

Everything since then, though – everything that’s happened in the last two years – oh yeah, I remember that. I remember that with such frightening clarity that I wish I didn’t, sometimes. The last two years are all I have to really know who I am. Everything before that morning in the hospital… It’s a secret that’s been locked away from me, possibly forever, and although sometimes I catch myself yearning to know what my life was like before the day I woke up, I have to admit that I’m afraid of the answers I might find. The scars on my wrists are the very epitome of that apprehension, and it constantly boils beneath the smooth tissue like a festering virus that will, for all I know, eventually consume me.

Cheerful way to start this, isn’t it? Well, you have my most sincere apologies, but there’s not really a whole hell of a lot I can do about that. It’s just the way things are. There’s a whole other world lingering just beyond my grasp, and it’s an intimate, conflicting obsession of mine that always seems to lurk on the furthest, darkest outskirts of my mind.

If there’s one thing I know about us with any amount of certainty, it’s the fact that I am – and we are – a muse. Hell, even then, the only _reason_ I know this is because of my current master. It’s not like she found a card on me when she found me equally by some freakish coincidence in the dumpster; the only ID I’d had on me at the time was a suspended driver’s license. It’s still a mystery to me to this day how she of all people knew – and as far as I’ve been able to figure, she’s no closer to an answer than I am – but… Well, that’s what I am. A muse.

I hope to god you still know what a muse is, because if not… Look, it’s called dictionary dot com, alright? Find the nearest smartphone or unlocked computer or whatever – anything with Wi-Fi will do – and look it up there. However, no, I am not some descendant of Zeus or any of his kids or wherever the original nine muses came from. At least, I’m pretty sure I’m not. All I know is that I’m a muse, savvy? If anything, if I had to pick _anything_ to do with Greek mythology to help you understand better, the only way I can think of describing… me, really, is by telling you that I’d be most closely related to Euterpe, the muse of music.

Only I’m a guy – and quite proud to be one. (Yeah… PMS, menopause, periods, pregnancy, blah blah blah – I get enough lip from my master on how good we men have it. My only comment is that women, the lucky twats, get multiple orgasms. We men have to _work_ at that! Ahem. Rant. Sorry, anyways…)

And yes, I actually _do_ do my homework occasionally, thank you very freaking much.

In short, I inspire my master predominantly through the means of music; however, I have managed to pluck an idea or two from things like socks and dreams about Wal-Mart over the years, as well.

Yeah, creative little bugger, aren’t I? If only she could appreciate that the same way others do.  

My job sucks, I’m not going to lie. I wouldn’t even wish it upon my arch nemesis’ spasmodic and alarmingly spiteful cat. But there’s not really a whole lot I can do about that, either, because my job pretty much encompasses my entire life. There’s no escaping it. I work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for all three-hundred and sixty-five days in a goddamn year. Imagine that for a minute, would you, and then come back to me complaining about how much your desk job sucks and the pay blows and you work so much overtime for nothing.

Boo-freaking-hoo. I don’t get paid _squat_. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Nada. Nil. Nothing. Oh yeah, you have it so bad, uh-huh.

Well suck it up, buttercup, ‘cause I have to kiss ass for _free_.

Anyways… My master figures that we muses are like computers. Each of our “users” – and I just stick with the term “master” because I feel more like a slave than anything else – formats us for their needs when we meet them… Somehow. Y’know, personality, the way we inspire them, so on and so forth… The whole nine yards. We essentially become the ideal muse suited to their personal requirements. Then when they’re finished with us or happen to meet with an unfortunate accident that ends their life, our “hard drives” are completely wiped, and we’re left with blank slates until the next “user” comes along and re-formats us upon introduction. Not consciously or anything – it just… happens.

Imagine that for a second, would ya? A human being with no personality, no thoughts to call their own really, wandering the streets without a single friggin’ clue as to who they are, driven by nothing but the inherent urge to find someone else to own them. I don’t know if I had a chance to undergo that particular experience, the whole wandering thing – all I know is that my current master said she found me in a dumpster, beat up with my wrists slit.

I know. Ain’t that great?

She’s been reminding me ever since how lucky I was that she happened to wander by when she did, because if it weren’t for her, then I’d “most likely be of no more use than fertilizer in a nameless grave” – which she tells me is close enough to the truth as things are. 

In any case, I lived with her and her family for a time mostly because I had no other choice, and hell, let’s face it, where would I go? I had no money; I only knew my name and age because of the badly stained driver’s license I had on me at the time, and for all I knew that could have been a fake. There were no records of my existence in the government database, either, which basically guarantees that my license was a forgery. What else could I do? A whole lot of nothing, that’s what – and living on the street after having to deal with the lingering smell of dumpster just really wasn’t all that appealing.

As things were, I was being subjected to a battery of tests – blood tests, CT scans, MRIs, EEGs… The doctor supervising my case did several physical exams to check my reflexes, sensory functions, balance, and various other aspects of my brain and nervous system to rule out further injury or illness. But everything came back either clean or inconclusive. In the end, after deferring to the expertise of the local shrink, they told me it was called “dissociative fugue,” and that it was temporary. It could last anywhere from a couple of days, to several months – but sooner or later, it would pass. I would, they said, eventually recover.

I don’t think my master’s parents really loved the idea, having a complete stranger in the house, but they agreed to act as a host family for a while, until I got back on my feet. Helped me register at the local Catholic high school – which my master, ironically enough knowing her take on the whole “religion” thing, attended as well – and for the next while, my life became somewhat conventionally normal. I made friends, got my shit back together, and bickered with my master like an old married couple, so says one of her comrades... In general, life was good.

Sure, the work she dumped on my shoulders was ill-appreciated, and more often than not I tended to reply to her demanding questions with a simple, rather sarcastic retort, but it was all good. (And besides, let’s face it, if she really wanted and needed a workaholic for a muse, she would’ve gotten one.)

I had a place to live, at least one friend that helped me ignore the constant thought of the healing wounds on my wrists, but more importantly, I was beginning to make a life for myself again. I was building up on the blank foundation that my previous master had abandoned me with.

It didn’t last, though. I’ve learned since then that nothing good in this world lasts.

I had to leave. Morgan, my often peevish and spiteful master, argued most admirably in my defense with her parents, but in the end, they won out. I’m not bitter, though, and I’ve got no plans on holding a grudge over it. With an extra person in the house, I was costing them extra money with the black hole that is my stomach, the extra tuition and basic necessities – I was consuming room they really didn’t have to spare.

I was, however, expendable. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, knowing that.

So where was I supposed to go? Well, Morgan had this idea. She was good friends with someone in the next province over who had ample funds and a “ginormous and drop-dead gorgeous behemoth of a mansion.”

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. “How in the hell would a small-town teenager who’s never been outside of Western Canada and Alaska know someone like _that_?” Well, don’t look at me, because I haven’t the slightest idea in hell how she knew this guy. Matter of fact, I _still_ don’t, and it drives me crazy every time I think about it.

All I knew was that every time she mentioned him, she got this creepy little grin on her face and was completely and totally disinclined to tell me why. So, off I went.

Let me tell you: when I first laid eyes on the iron gate in the brick wall surrounding the property, I knew my eyes were going to jump out of my head when I finally saw the house. And they nearly did. The place was freaking huge! I marvel every day of the week that I wake up and remember that I live here, that this is my home. But that’ll come later.

I met Julian first, being as he was the one who answered the door, and my first impression of this blonde Englishman was: “too happy, too polite, too pretty, too English, most likely flamingly gay… Verdict? Creepy.” Yeah, yeah, so I’m a little judgmental sometimes. Gimme a break, all right? He turned out to be a good guy in the end – practically the mom I, well… don’t have, I guess.

Potatoe was there hiding behind his legs the entire time he was catching up with Morgan and introducing me to the house and all that. She was adorable, right from that first moment, even though she stuck out her tongue at me and ran away when I tried to get past that childish shyness of hers. I think she actually kicked me in the shin a couple of days later, too, when I made yet another botched attempt.

I met Artemis next, and Julian had to bring me up to her dark, dingy hole-in-the-wall that she calls a room and practically drag her away from the numerous computers piled on the desk dominating one wall before she would even look at me. When she did, though, I have to admit that I was stunned. Brilliant amber eyes, heavily lined with smudged kohl, immediately seized my attention and for the first couple of seconds I was stumbling over my own words. I mean, I’d never seen eyes like that before in my life – er, not that I know of, anyways.

I guess that since I’m only technically two years old that doesn’t count for much though, does it?  

Sure, she was thin as a rake in addition to being flat as a board, and there was no push-up bra in the world that would have changed that fact, but her attitude and eccentric, impish nature made up for what she lacked in “womanly curvatures.” Piercings littered her face, marking her nose, both of her eyebrows, her lips, one of her cheeks, and her ears alone, hands down, would have given any airport security guard one hell of a time. She was still learning English when we first met, so she couldn’t really say much. Those eyes, though… They said more than enough.

She hated my friggin’ guts, and she trusted me just about as far as she could throw me – which, given her size, was not saying a whole hell of a lot.

Then again, back in those days, I think she hated everyone’s guts except… well… the only other three people in the Manor. Okay. Never mind. So for the most part it was just me in that particular household at the time. The rest of the world could kindly go fuck itself in her opinion, and only Julian, Potatoe, and this mystery friend of Morgan’s had been spared from her wrath.

I consider her one of my best friends now, no matter how often I’d rather punch her in the face than talk to her. It’s amazing how she’s changed, though, even I can admit that much; she started out angry and leery of everyone – men in particular – carrying too much baggage to handle on her own, and now…

Well, the complete opposite, really. At times. She’s still got one hell of an attitude on her when she’s having a bad day.   

The big moment was coming up. Julian, with Potatoe braced on his hip, had told me that Rori – oh, was that his name? – had been working rather studiously in the library before, and he’d been reluctant to introduce me just then. Now, however… Now was the moment that I was to finally meet the Master of Bloodstar Manor.

And the way he eye-balled me with those white-green eyes of his creeped the ever-loving _shit_ out of me, let me tell you. I swear to god, I think my balls decided to relocate to a warmer climate the first time I met him. Of course, it probably didn’t help that when I first shook his hand, it happened to be as cold as ice; the way he’d held onto my hand afterwards, then slowly lifted it to his mouth for a kiss, complete with a devilish smirk on his lips, just might have had something to do with it, too, though.

That was when I was airily told that Rori was a vampire. (Yeah, like that’s such a commonplace thing in today’s world, I remember thinking. Of course, I later found out that it was actually true. The world is littered with all sorts of supernatural creatures – people just don’t know about them, and they’re probably better off that way.)

Imagine that, though – an immensely successful businessman who just so happened to be one of the bloodsucking undead. Go figure, eh? So that’s what’s wrong with the corporate world today. Ah well. At least he wasn’t a lawyer, that’s what I remember thinking at the time. I don’t know where the hell that thought came from, but you know what?

Fuck it. I’m a muse; I’m allowed to be random.

After visiting for a couple of days while I settled in, Morgan left, and I was faced with the daunting task of attempting to cope with a brutal reality. I was stranded here, alone, in a house full of complete and total strangers – all of whom quickly became the proud new owners of an invisible ID tag, courtesy of none other than yours truly.

Julian: the lover of the Master of the Manor, as well as the perpetually smiling and mild-mannered schizophrenic Mad Hatter/Incubus – Cambion, technically, seeing as he’s only half incubus – who can suck souls out of the living and use them as fuel to elongate his own life. Not to mention he did this weird thing with some of the souls he’s taken over the years and, I don’t know, melded some of them with one of Rori’s rings or something, and apparently this thing helps protect him – Rori, that is – from sunlight. The actual mechanics of the whole thing are beyond me entirely, but considering the fact that I never before would have believed that such a feat was even possible, I figured it would be a kind of cool tidbit to mention. That ring is the only one of its kind in the whole world, and if Rori’s not wearing it, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to find him storing it up his asshole for safe keeping, because that is one vault that _no one_ would be breaching no matter how good a thief they are. Speaking of…  

Artemis: the German hacker/freelance thief who appeared out of nowhere with a recorded history of thefts and other misdemeanors longer than my friggin’ arm. Also comes with a questionable but shady past that I don’t think anyone other than Rori knows even today. He found her half-starved, going through withdrawals, and practically half-dead in the middle of winter in one of the stables, though – that ought to imply enough on its own that it is not a conversation topic to be touched upon.

Potatoe: the young girl whom Rori and Julian adopted from the streets and saved from an almost certain death. Julian home-schools her for the most part, since little girls named Potatoe would almost certainly chatter at great length with other little girls about her rather less than conventional home life. Never mind the fact that most people would simply brush it off as a child’s imaginative whimsies – there would still be no denying the attention that it would bring her, and the questions it would inevitably provoke in regards to her psychological well-being.   

And then… There was Rori. Rori O’ _fucking_ -Connor. What else is there for me to say about him? The man is the very epitome of the word “trouble” for me. That’s all he’s ever caused me, and all too quickly, I began to realize exactly what form this trouble was to come about in.

Now, this bit is still rather difficult for me, so I hope that you’ll bear with me on this one, but… some shit happened that I’m not too fond of remembering, much less _relaying_ to others.

To start, let me tell you something about this particular vampire. Rori was a libertine when he was alive, and he was a libertine after his abnormal death. He remained as promiscuous as they came throughout the centuries, with a sex-drive to which none could compare, and an infinite fount of lust that resided unchecked within him.

I was one of the people, probably among many, that frequently fell victim to that lust… and not voluntarily. I remember…

Christ. I can still remember the first time he appeared in my room during the night. Since practically day one I was aware of just how flirtatious the man was, how fond he was of copping feels off young men and sometimes women that he found attractive – and I suppose it was his way of froshing, welcoming me to the household, as things were. To appoint it his own personal duty to harass me as much as possible… But that night wasn’t just another one of his jokes where he’d creep the shit out of me and then laugh it off and flounce away. Because that’s exactly what he does. He creeps, and then he flounces.

The fact that he came in under the cover of darkness woke me from an indescribable nightmare only to throw me headlong and reeling into another. I was scared stiff, and when I first realized that he wasn’t just kidding around and being playful in his own twisted way, I naturally began to fight back.

What I realized then was that attempting to resist a vampire – especially one as old as Rori – is futile, a waste of energy when you could be using that strength to hold back tears, to prevent your cries from being heard… to feebly ignore the pain. To try and convince yourself that this isn’t really happening, that it’s all a bad dream and nothing more and within moments you’ll be awake and safe again.

This was also the night when I found out that all of those stories, when they say that vampires cower before the sight and touch of the cross… Well, those stories and their authors are full of shit. Because they don’t cower and they don’t hiss at the cross. It doesn’t cow them at all.

As a matter of fact, Rori simply laughed at me, remarked on how adorable my effort was, and threw the crucifix away.   

That was the first time it happened, and no one knew. He never told the others and neither did I. I blamed my sudden seclusion and emotional distance on being homesick, that I was still adjusting to living here and the things that came with it. I didn’t dare tell anyone what actually took place in that bedroom. After all, I’d just moved in, I didn’t know him… How was I supposed to know that the next time wouldn’t be worse?

Time passed and there was no next time, as I’d been expecting. Yue, Yami, Kali and Faith showed up at the Manor, one after the other – all outcasts, transients and walking enigmas – and life regained a somewhat distorted sense of normalcy. (As normal as things can get when you’re living with creatures who shouldn’t exist.) I was able to find some solace in the new company, because even though Artemis could speak sufficient, if dodgy English by this time, she often remained cooped up in her room, dealing with unspoken issues – carefully camouflaged demons – of her own.

But as I’ve already mentioned… The peace, the safety…? It didn’t last.

I’ve been taken against my will more times than I care to count. I don’t like saying “raped,” because… Well, it’s hard to explain, really. It’s something I know I don’t want, and I’m powerless to stop it from happening, but it’s not very often that Rori’s actually been violent in… forcing himself upon me. Granted, there have been times when his grip on his vampyric nature has slipped a little, and I’ve been left with wounds both physical and emotional and an immensely sore body… But it’s not always like that.

He told me once during one of these covert encounters that he didn’t want to hurt me, he didn’t want me to be afraid that he would – get this – _abuse_ me, all very gently with his fingers in my hair and a delicate kiss pressed to my cheek. I may not want it, and I may fight back, but there are steps that he takes as a vampire to… lessen the damage, I suppose one could say. Manipulation and some kind of fogging of the mind, things like that; something that allows the sensations of the body to override and overwhelm any sense of fear or need to struggle. I guess you could almost relate it to a telepathic drug, of sorts. A psychic aphrodisiac. In essence, as ugly as it sounds, he forces me to enjoy it.  

There is still a part of me that panics when he touches me, though, when he decides to…

It’s not as bad as it was then, when I first moved in, but… I’ve never belonged to myself. I’ve never been my own master – the “master of my own destiny,” if you really want me to be corny about it – but I guess that’s something I’ve just had to get used to over time. 

Things would be different if I could just blindly accept them as they were. The only problem is… I don’t know. I’m more _confused_ now than anything when he drops by for those visits under the cover of darkness. I can’t tell anymore if I’m actually enjoying what’s going on or if I still hate it, and Rori’s just been pulling the same tricks with my head that he always has. I’m confused, and… there’s…

I don’t know. Something just… feels _different_ , somehow, like some obscure thing has changed in the ten months that I’ve been living here. I can’t say how or what or why… All I know is that it’s something about _Rori_.  

So that’s my life now. That’s _our_ life now. A life spinning ‘round a never-ending cycle of confusion and manipulated emotions; a life infused with the elements of a supernatural world that most probably wouldn’t believe unless they saw it for themselves.

My name is Jason Vaughn Riley, I’m eighteen years old, and I am a muse. This is my story.

This is _our_ story.  

**-x-**

To Be Continued…

**-x-**

**So, like it? Hate it? Wish it would spontaneously combust? Leave me a review and tell me all about it! C’mon, I wanna know _everything!_ –maniacal cackle- **


	2. Chapter One

_August 30_

_Two-fifty… Two-fifty-one, two-fifty-two, two-fifty-three, two-fifty-… Ah, fuck it._

Jason threw off his covers and rolled to the edge of the bed, a deep yawn pulling at his chest as he linked his fingers, arched his spine, and stretched his arms above his head. A tiny grimace flashed across his countenance as long, thin scabs tugged themselves taut across his back, a discomforting sensation with which he’d become all too familiar, much as he wished otherwise. With a muted groan whispering out of his throat, he distractedly massaged the knotted muscles at the nape of his neck, and cracked it with a single deft twitch to the side.

Christ, he was bored – and tired. So goddamn frigging tired, and yet, go figure, he couldn’t sleep. Sure, the thunder was loud enough to make him wonder if the windowpanes in Yue’s tower were rattling, and each strike of lightning lit up his room like the extra-large flash of a camera right outside his bedroom window, but it wasn’t to blame for his insomnia. The storms never were. Half the time he’d forgotten it was even there; it’d become little more than white noise making a feeble attempt to lull him to sleep as it pummelled the world outside of the Manor.  

Slouched listlessly on the edge of his bed – nothing more than a pair of double mattresses stacked on the floor of his equally slapdash, albeit large bedroom, really – he shot a vapid glance at the phosphorescent green numbers of the digital clock perched precariously amidst the jumbled contents of his bookshelf. Another deafening clap of thunder shattered the silence of the night, rumbling through the atmosphere as it gripped the Manor in its mighty hands and tried to shake it loose from its foundations – but the Manor refused to budge, refused to even so much as quiver before nature’s wrath. It was a true testament to the notion that one’s home reflected the essence of its master.

Utterly _fucking_ unflappable.  

Shunting the embittered thought aside, his figure wilted with a soft, crestfallen expulsion of breath at the time. 3:32.

 _Shit,_ he cursed mutely, stifling a yawn as he rubbed his face into his hand.

Right now, it wasn’t such a big deal – his favourite thing about summer vacation was the fact that he could sleep in as late as he wanted to compensate for the slumber his insomnia often robbed him of – but in another couple of days, such a number would be spelling his doom. It meant he’d have just under two and a half hours to get some much-needed sleep before he’d have to haul his ass out of bed and start getting ready for school.

Sagging over his knees, Jason’s head drooped forward and he gave the back of his neck another weary rub. _Means I’m gonna have to start selling my soul for some of those energy drinks Arty’s always hoarding. Otherwise school’s gonna be even more of a bitch than last year._

Disinclined to dwell yet further on the notion as well as its subsequent consequences until he absolutely had to, Jason pushed himself to his feet and wavered unsteadily for a moment, arms gawkily spread in a bid for balance, in a body left lethargic and clumsy from the protracted hours of inactivity. Before long, however, he regained his sense of equilibrium and wandered towards the door, yawning behind a loosely clenched fist.

Since it had been made all but painfully clear to him that he wasn’t going to be getting any shut-eye in the foreseeable future, he supposed there was no point in wasting his time with something as trivial as counting sheep – certainly not when there were better things he could be doing. Like eating. Or… hell, _anything_ , really, as long as it had nothing to do with sheep or just lying there to watch the proverbial paint peel on his ceiling. After all, there was only so long he could bear doing something so excruciatingly _tedious_ before fearing that the activity in his brain might cease entirely, and at the rate he was going, it was beginning to look increasingly likely that he would skip sleep altogether and simply bore himself straight into a coma.

Sure, he liked sleeping – and more than most, at that – but that was seriously pushing it.

Bending with a soft expulsion of breath to pluck up a discarded t-shirt from the disorderly clutter of his floor as he maneuvered his way through the dark – the warm, engraved steel of his dog tags collided with a gentle metallic clinking against his naked chest as he straightened – Jason lent his drowsy mind only a moment to contemplate what lay beyond his room.

At this hour, most of the Manor would be asleep, with the girls tucked quietly into their bedrooms on the second storey and Yami no doubt sleeping like the dead, with his belligerent Siamese cat cuddled up pretty as you please in a little loaf of pure, unadulterated evil beside him. Artemis was probably still awake, but she was most likely up to her ears in coffee cups, computer codes and ten different kinds of freshly-broken laws regarding the use of said computers. There was a possibility that she was in the basement, stomping and bouncing her way through the most difficult songs DDR had to offer, if the storm hadn’t taken the power out yet. (And if it had… Well, she’d probably called it quits, exhausting every curse word imaginable and then some in a muttered tirade about power outages, before admitting defeat and turning in for the night.) All in all, however, the house would be sedate, for once; settling on its foundations with a weary sigh, no doubt, and relishing the brief respite while it could.

Of course, that still left the worst-case scenario of running into Rori, and while that was the absolute _last_ thing he wanted – to meet the vampire in a pitch-black hall whilst wearing only a single flimsy layer of clothing to protect himself from venturous, groping hands… Sadly, even _that_ seemed better than any alternatives that might be waiting for him here. In the dark. Staring at the ceiling. Listening to the torrential lashing of rain against his windows. Tossing and turning and flopping about restlessly in a feeble attempt to coerce sleep into whisking him away.

 _Fuck my life,_ his brain mumbled grumpily as he pulled his t-shirt over his head and shrugged himself into it.  

If he crossed paths with the vampire, he quietly admitted to himself that he was genuinely prepared to scream like a little girl and run for the hills - particularly if it meant he would, _eventually_ , go to sleep tonight without cursing the man every time he tried to move or unconsciously flexed his ass muscles.

He pulled the heavy mahogany door open with a hesitant hand and, casting a wide-eyed glance both ways for any signs of the lurking undead, warily slid into the eerie stillness of the long, cavernous hall when he found it seemingly devoid of life. That didn’t really mean much when it all came down to it – Rori was notorious for his proclivity for popping up out of absolutely nowhere – but for the time being, he supposed it would just have to do. But he swore to god that if the vampire suddenly found himself with a fancy to play cat and mouse with him again, Jason was going to grab the nearest thing available and beat the unliving daylights out of his pasty white hypersexual ass. He was going on almost thirty-six hours without sleep, and if the undead overgrown leech decided to mess with him now of all times, he was going to be doing so at his own goddamn risk.

At least, that’s what he liked to tell himself.     

Passing the sweeping staircase as he plodded quietly into the massive, silent foyer – keeping a cagey ear tuned into his surroundings – Jason distractedly pondered the solitary presence of his room on the main floor. Not that he was complaining really, since Rori’s, Yami’s, and the girls’ rooms were all upstairs, but it wasn’t beneath him to admit that, in a mansion so vast in magnitude, it left him with a distinct feeling of seclusion every now and then, either. The fact that he’d chosen that room specifically _for_ its seclusion was just one of many trifling details that often left him with an innate urge to kick himself square in the head.

If he’d had even the slightest of inklings in regards to what the future had had in store for him, he would have thought twice about separating himself from the herd. For centuries, doddering old grannies had been warning their broods about what happened to lambs that strayed from their flock – but since he’d never had the luxury of sitting in on that particular lesson, Jason had all but crawled straight into the wolf’s stomach.

Rori and Julian probably would have obliged him if he asked to move into another room, but his stuff was already there, and despite the fact that Rori could doubtlessly manage the change without even so much as tousling his immaculate carmine hair, he would insist upon Jason doing it himself… and Jason, quite honestly, was ten different kinds of Too Damn Lazy to bother. Especially in a house this size.

Never mind the fact that, if he changed rooms, he would be subjected to the never-ending hell and anarchy that came with sharing a single bathroom between four girls and a prickly-haired metrosexual. And that metrosexual’s cat.

_Fuck that noise, man. I’ll stick with the isolation ward._

He sucked in a shallow breath through his teeth, shoulders stiffening as the cold marble tile of the Grand Foyer greeted the calloused soles of naked feet, skittered up his spine in a mocking little shiver, and made him yearn quietly for the warmth of the carpet. The thunder grumbled its discontent around him, its guttural voice permeating the walls even here, in the belly of the Manor.

Then again, he didn’t think it mattered _where_ his room was - upstairs or down, by himself or surrounded by others, the satyromaniacal vampire would have invited himself in regardless. The broken lock proved that, and even if Rori hadn’t _physically_ wrecked the lock, he could have easily just teased it open with his telekinetic… mind power… stuff. And with abilities like those, there wasn’t a lock in the world capable of deterring the man. It wouldn’t matter how many security devices Jason put on his door, or his window, the Englishman would still be able to find a way into his bedroom.

For fuck’s sake, the vampire could phase through material barriers like a perpetually horny version of Casper, the too-friendly voyeuristic human-humper.

Once one was put at odds against a vampire – especially if that one happened to be a mere mortal, as Jason was – he swore there was just no way to win.

_Stupid cheating supernatural bastard._

Chewing on the notion with a distracted scowl, Jason strolled across the cool marble floors of the main hall, checked with black and white with a large compass rose laid into the core of the chamber, his arms folded lazily over his chest, gaze idly roaming where it pleased in the darkness.

No matter how long he lived here, he had a feeling he’d never quite have a handle on the idea that Rori had built most of the palatial Manor himself. With its graceful roman columns, the elegant, elaborate formation of the vaulted ceilings, latticed windows, and vast corridors, the very suggestion that the Manor had been constructed by the hands of a single man seemed positively ludicrous. Trying to comprehend the complexity of assembling the Grand Foyer by itself – and that room _alone_ , much less the rest of the house – along with the workmanship and proficiency that would have been required in order for the venture to be successful, was outright staggering.

Rori had to be lying, Jason mused, pausing in the middle of the chamber and trailing his gaze over the intricacies of the architecture as though he were seeing it all for the first time again. There was just no way – vampire or not – that one man could have done all of this by himself. The time that it would have taken, the painstakingly meticulous planning and the skill needed, not to mention the substantial amount of manpower required to construct something of such an enormous magnitude…

The taste of the décor and overall design reeked of the Englishman’s influence in all the right ways of course, but he just couldn’t picture Rori – suave, impeccable Lothario that he was – rolling up his sleeves to spend years mortaring brick, carving marble and staining wood before putting all of it together. If he hadn’t known any better, he wouldn’t have even thought the hypersexual vampire capable of effectively assembling a wooden _shack_ , much less an entire mansion. _Especially_ not a mansion like Bloodstar.

_He would’ve been too busy trying to screw the carpenters selling him the wood._

Half the time he’d been living here, he’d felt like he’d just stumbled into some long-gone noble’s palace or something. People just didn’t _live_ in places like these anymore – they were owned by museums, restored and maintained by whole organizations dedicated to the preservation of historical architecture and times gone by. They weren’t private _residences_. 

_And yet…_

Here he was. In a private residence that would have put a queen’s summer retreat to shame.

_I’m never gonna get used to this place._

Suddenly feeling very small and vulnerable in the center of the foyer, Jason took a slow breath as he crossed his arms tighter against his chest – mismatched eyes crawling once more around the dark, massive chamber, and the balconies running its perimeter – and decided to continue his wandering.

It wasn’t below him to admit that Bloodstar Manor was, without a doubt, a fine, majestic old mansion, but there was no denying either the disquiet that sometimes gripped him when he felt the weight of its years at night. There was a thickness in the air that was rarely present during the day, a congealing of the Manor’s history and memories that put his nerves on edge. He’d wondered more than once if the Manor was haunted, and though the other residents had all denied ever experiencing something so otherworldly – the more sarcastic of them even mocking him outright over such a notion – Julian had quietly admitted to him afterwards that there was indeed a _feeling_ about the house that he could not quite place. As though, somehow, the house had taken on a consciousness of its own over the long span of its existence.   

Jason hadn’t felt inclined to go on any of his nightly rambles for almost three full weeks after that conversation, much less engage in some of his more… intimate practices. That lone comment had left him feeling distinctly uneasy around the Manor, put on edge by its portraits and gargoyles, its suits of armour and massive, dark corridors, and by the time he began to brave the night-time halls again, he’d made a particular habit of turning on the occasional light as he went. He also made a marked effort not to think about “The Amityville Horror,” or any other such movies he’d seen involving haunted and/or otherwise satanic houses suddenly coming to life and mercilessly tormenting their inhabitants, frequently to death. 

And, of course, when Rori found out about it – as he inevitably did – he’d teased Jason over it for the next month and a half. As a matter of fact, the horny bloodsucker still made a point of sporadically poking fun at him because of it.

 _So sue me for being human and getting creeped out by creepy old houses._ Quietly bristling with indignant memories and cursing the Englishman’s roguish sense of humour, Jason tried to ignore the tiny hairs on the back of his neck that began to stand on end, suppressed his urge to suddenly shiver in the darkness and the silence, and folded his arms more securely against his chest.

Despite the fact that the Manor had a boiler system installed – Jason couldn’t understand what was so god-awful about modern furnaces and air-conditioning – it still relied predominantly on the numerous large fireplaces scattered about the house to keep it comfortably warm. And since fire was the single most dangerous threat to Rori’s second ‘life,’ if one could really call it that, he’d all but forbidden leaving the hearths lit overnight unless there was someone awake to monitor them, which in turn left the Manor as well as its more human inhabitants entirely too vulnerable to a nocturnal chill. 

Yami in particular, who despised any temperatures lower than ten degrees Celsius, had made an explicit habit of reminding Rori that if he’d just give it up and put in a furnace, like any _other_ twenty-first century household, they wouldn’t have that problem. Jason, on the other hand, just wanted some functional air-conditioning. It got too damn hot this close to the coast during the summer for his liking, and short of spending every day in a bathtub full of ice cubes, there was no other way to keep sufficiently cool, which made the lack of air-conditioning just… inhumane.

Then again, considering just who it was that owned this place, that made perfect sense. Of _course_ Rori would enjoy seeing his mortal wards glistening with sweat and stripping down to the bare minimum. Sick bastard.        

Paying minimal heed to the shadows lurking in the corners of the vast foyer like protective spirits placidly standing guard, Jason began wandering towards the enormous library at the front of the house before he paused, squinted at the pitch-black maw beyond the open double doors, and reconsidered. It was the perfect place to be if he wanted to scare the ever-loving piss out of himself. On the average night it wasn’t such a big deal, but at three in the morning in the middle of a raging thunderstorm… Maybe not such a good idea. Particularly since, if the sudden explosion of a telling electrical snap and crackle was any indication to be trusted, the storm had just blown the breakers.

 _Great. Just what I needed,_ his thoughts absently grumbled to themselves in the dark, scowling at nothing in particular. _What I wouldn’t give for some Riddick eyes right about now…_  

Well, truth be told, it wasn’t that much of a loss. He didn’t know what he’d do in there, anyways, other than aimlessly browse through the books cramming the expansive shelves that spanned its two floors. He didn’t have the attention span or the patience to sit down and read by firelight, never mind the fact that he didn’t greatly trust the contents of the vampire’s library to begin with. Artemis and Kali liked to go on scavenger hunts for books relating to all kinds of morally questionable material, and the rate at which they returned with something to show for it was more than enough incentive for him to want as little to do with Rori’s library as possible. He could count the number of times he _hadn’t_ wanted to claw out his eyeballs afterwards on a single hand and have fingers left over.

Not to mention, there were too many places in which a shifty vampire, often with sleazy intent, could hide in the library – too many nooks and crannies that Jason couldn’t keep an eye on.    

But then, he _did_ have time to kill. Might as well spend that time aimlessly wandering – maybe he’d find some kind of secret passageway or something. Not like he had anything better to do, right?

Well, not unless those sheep _really_ wanted him back to watch their fleecy butts jump over a rickety old fence, anyways.

With the notion of the libidinous vampire prowling, ever-present, on the outskirts of his thoughts, Jason heaved a sigh and turned towards the western wing of the house. There were still rooms in that area of the Manor he wasn’t entirely familiar with yet – never mind the fact that the whole of the western wing on the second storey remained an absolute mystery to him. If he thought he could get in there, he probably would have – there was no denying that he was curious about it – but for some reason, the doors to the west wing were always locked. They always had been, since the very first day he’d arrived here, and not even Artemis had been able to pick her way in.

 _Guess that goes to say something about whatever it is Rori’s keeping back there,_ Jason idly mused. After all, no lock was safe when the German was around. If the others found something she hadn’t already tickled her way into – or if there was a lock standing in the way of whatever mischief they were planning – they would often retrieve her from whatever it was _she_ happened to be doing at the time to assist them. Her touch was deft, precise, and what was worse, impossibly and unnervingly effortless.

And yet, the western wing of the second floor remained untouched. The eastern wing of the second floor didn’t even have doors _to_ lock.

 _Then again, knowing Rori,_ Jason snorted quietly in the silence and the darkness of the corridor as a small, dry smile curled upon the edges of his lips; _I don’t think I_ want _to know what he’s keeping in there. ‘Specially if he’s going to such great lengths to keep everyone else out of it._ After all, the vampire was hardly the prudish type, which could only mean that whatever secrets he was hiding in the west wing, they were ones better left undisturbed.

No doubt Artemis’s take on the whole thing was the polar opposite. He was curious, yes, but he also had a sneaking suspicion that he would be better off not knowing the things even Rori wouldn’t discuss in casual conversation. It seemed a fairly logical conclusion, when considering someone renowned for being as shameless and blue as even the most promiscuous of sex-trade workers.

Nevertheless, for some reason currently escaping his powers of logic, it almost seemed as though Rori’s little eccentricities had begun to grow less and less disturbing to him since he had been somewhat forcefully deported to this gothic mansion. It was odd, and more than just a tad disconcerting, to consider the possibility that he was even beginning to _like_ the vampire.

Not in gay terms, mind you. Not even close. Jason was one hundred percent straight and he had no intentions of changing that anytime soon.

In spite of the bizarre, writhing ball of nerves in the pit of his stomach, he brushed the thought off. For the most part, he liked to think that it was simply because Rori often proved himself to be better company than most of the other tenants… in some weird, freakishly masochistic way. Of course, that was to say “better company” apart from all of the pick-up lines, gropes, sexual gestures, innuendos and the occasional drugging. Regardless of the many prominent flaws flourishing within the vampire’s rather dysfunctional personality, however, he was a smart man; he had a brain, and made frequent use of it, most often during the scores of verbal sparring matches he engaged in with almost childish delight.

To put it briefly, as ludicrous and juvenile as he knew it probably seemed to others… In a twisted, backwards kind of way, it was _fun_ to argue with the Englishman. It was fun to pick fights with him and try to, for once, flummox the poised Prince of the Art of Mincing Words and render him speechless. However, it was also, at best, a positively gruelling endeavour at which he was failing miserably.

Passing one of the massive, lavish doors in the western wing of the first floor, Jason slowed to a stop, a minute frown gradually forming on his brow as he stared into the darkness, listened, blinked, and backed up. The deliberate, lilting timbre of the grand piano whispered through the crevices, enveloping him in a great wave with its melancholy notes as they fluidly melted one into the other. He let his lids droop shut and welcomed the music into his being, letting it trickle over and caress his soul until he recognized the melody, and opened his eyes once again. 

Chopin, Prelude Op. 28, No. 4 in E minor.

As a natural-born muse, Jason had always possessed a particular empathy to music – since as far back as he could remember, anyways, which he supposed wasn’t really saying a whole hell of a lot when it all came down to it – capable of sensing a person’s mood through the melody, their emotions and thoughts. And this music, this heart-wrenching piano solo, encompassed and conveyed the deepest soulful pain of the performer, drawing him like a proverbial moth to the flame. Whoever it was on the other side of that door was playing the piano alone, twisted within the tapestry of the past and mourning the losses of loved ones; it was a torment so palpable and immense that Jason’s throat achingly clenched itself shut against his conscious will.

Shaking his head as he blinked in rapid succession in an attempt to purge the overwhelming flood of emotions from his mind, Jason dragged himself back into reality.

 _That’s weird,_ his thoughts softly murmured once they’d come back to themselves. _No one should be up. Not even Rori is usually up this late. But…_ Unless something had suddenly changed, unless someone was hiding something from the rest of the Manor, Rori was the only one who knew how to play the piano like that. Mismatched orbs of platinum silver and inky russet flitted indecisively over the carved wooden facade of the door before he decided to quietly crack it open. The metal lever of the door’s handle was cool against his palm, the motion smooth and wary as he twisted it downwards, with his other hand resting tentatively upon the wood.

Lightning slashed through the dense shadows, contorting the sheets of rain streaming down the tall window like some ethereal creature craving access denied by the glass. Jason’s head twitched back in surprise, blinking in that flash of terminal brilliance as he spotted the familiar figure seated on the windowsill, one knee crooked with an arm resting pensively atop it. The curtains were thrown aside, sharply illuminating the redhead’s ivory skin and striking frost-green eyes as he gazed out into the gloom of the warring elements.

Well, speak of the devil…

Rori.

Jason silently edged into the room, heedless for the moment of the strange, unassisted behaviour of the instrument that poured forth such disturbingly slow, melancholy chords. Rori didn’t seem to even notice his entrance, and if he had, the vampire chose to disregard it – a response that was a rather suspicious oddity in itself. Despite Jason’s supreme efforts to remain anchored in reality, however, the music swelled over him yet again, threatening to drown him with its confession of precious, vigilantly masked emotion. Each note became a wave, rushing over him as the ocean caresses the shore, and each ebb of that flow lured him deeper into the room, mesmerized by the melody.

_… kinda looks like an angel, sitting there like that._

Jason froze, shocked by the thought that had slipped abruptly through his mind, accompanied on the arm of the most peculiar of feelings – one he couldn’t put a finger on. Each time he seemed about to pinpoint it, it slid away from his grasp with the same evasive proficiency as mercury. He shook his head, trying his very best to banish the notion from his mind. _It’s just the music. I’m just letting it get to me more than usual._ And it wasn’t something terribly uncommon, as it were; this certainly wasn’t the first time his perception of the world around him had been altered merely by the mood of a song.

With his back to the door, he began to gently ease it shut without truly acknowledging the action of doing so, his fingers tight around the curved handle; when a soft, protracted squeal was mewled by old hinges, he winced and clenched his lids shut. _Shit…_ _Shit, shit, shit,_ he mutely cursed.

The piano fell silent in mid-measure; the spell was broken.

When Jason looked back up for the source of disruption – although he already knew full and well what it had been, courtesy of his unrivalled genius, he mentally scoffed at himself – he saw twin pools of pale, ethereal mint-green peering back at him through the thin undulating veil of the storm’s flickering light.

A sonorous, charmingly accented voice greeted him. “Good evening, Jason.”

“S-sorry!” Jason failed miserably in keeping the crack of shock from his voice – a failure that was met with not just a bit of a begrudged grimace. He cleared his throat and began again. “Uh… Sorry. Did I, ah… Sorry,” he offered with an apologetic chuckle, lifting bared palms in an unconscious gesture of placation. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you.” Ah, much better. Well, sort of; he didn’t sound quite so much like a schoolboy who’d just hit puberty anymore, at least, and for that alone he was amply grateful.

The vampire mutely shook his head and returned his gaze to the window. “I thought I was the only one up,” he quietly murmured. “You have my most sincere apologies if I woke you with my playing.”

This time it was Jason’s turn to shake his head, laughing softly if somewhat sheepishly under his breath as he massaged the back of his neck. “I kind of assumed the same, but I guess we were both wrong, hey?” He shrugged, batting the immortal’s latter comment into non-existence. “Nah, you didn’t wake me up. I couldn’t sleep, same as usual. Yay for insomnia,” he added tensely with a strained chortle. “So, uh… What about you?”

The vampire gentleman’s smooth, sensuous voice was hesitant in replying, even if only for a moment as those surreal irises slid thoughtfully downwards. “I have been somewhat… _restless_ of late, yes.”

Casting a curious glance at the piano, Jason absently noticed how Rori had suspended his private performance upon recognizing that his solitude had been breached. A brow furrowed in wonder. It was public knowledge that the vampire was easily more than capable of multi-tasking, so why would such an inadvertent interruption cause him to stop? Rori loved playing the piano when an audience was present. He adored seeing the awe in their eyes as his fingers moved unnaturally over the keys, or the dreaminess amongst them that his music often invoked – in Jason especially.

Brushing the thought aside required more effort than Jason had originally assumed, but he succeeded in abandoning the notion for the time being as he folded his arms and leaned against the wall.

The very instant he felt the polished wood panelling against his scabbed and lacerated back however, Rori looked his way again, a cordial smile coming subtly to life on his white mouth in the shadows. “I beg you pardon my lapse of etiquette, dear one. Please,” With but a waving gesture of the vampire’s large, long-fingered hand, the piano’s bench slid out gracefully from beneath the ivory keys, “have a seat.”

It never failed to send a little shiver racing up his spine when Rori did shit like that – it was just plain spooky, in his opinion. Cool, sure, but spooky nonetheless. He still hadn’t quite adjusted to the minutiae of the whole… ‘living-with-a-reanimated-dead-guy-with-a-blood-dependancy-and-supernatural-powers’ thing yet. It was kind of sad, too, now that he thought about it. He’d been here for, what, three quarters of a year by now, and he still hadn’t gotten over the fact that more than half of his housemates weren’t entirely human.

Never mind the fact that he wasn’t exactly one’s run-of-the-mill mortal himself.

The vampire was still watching him from his place at the window, the expression on his sculpted marble countenance soft, and thoughtful. No doubt waiting on Jason’s response with the patience of a statue.  

“Uh… ‘kay. Thanks, I guess.” Apprehensively unfolding his arms, he hesitantly made his way across the dark room, watching with a wary eye as Rori finally slid into motion and swung his legs down from the sill.

The vampire crossed one lengthy appendage over the other while lighting a cigarette that had presumably appeared out of thin air, for the rest of the package was nowhere to be seen. With his back against the glass, the brilliant, flaring embers of his cigarette only minutely illuminated his face while the rest was drowned in deep and rippling blue shadow. Even so, Jason could see how that soft smile widened on pale lips, eyes glittering with reflected light, as he sat down.

The Englishman languidly waved out his match and discarded it on the sill next to him, taking a long, deliberate pull on his cigarette – washing his countenance in a blossom of warm orange light – before he removed it from his lips, and released a fine, streamlined plume of smoke. “You look rather fetching tonight.”

Faltering only for a moment, Jason hastily recovered with a muffled snort and a roll of his contrasting eyes. “Tch, right. Maybe if you’re into the whole ‘couldn’t-sleep-so-I-spent-all-night-running-my-hands-through-my-hair-and-beating-my-head-against-the-wall’ look,” he sarcastically muttered, realizing entirely too late how inappropriately the vampire would interpret half of the sentence – a suspicion that was confirmed the very instant his grin broadened around the glowing cigarette.

“Mmm, tousled and frustrated,” he purred in delectation. “Actually, I find that it suits you quite well, dear one.”

There it was again – just the smallest of twitches, barely noticeable, when the vampire used the very pet name he’d come to dread since his residence in Bloodstar Manor began. “That’s nice.” He sharply muttered, pinning the smirking immortal with a bland stare. _Dunno whether I should be taking that as a compliment or an insult…_

“Compliment,” the vampire salubriously affirmed.

“Bite me.”

“Always with an overabundance of pleasure, my love.” There was a pause laden with meaning before the deep velveteen purr of the Englishman’s voice came again, rich with amusement and innuendo. “But you already knew _that_ , didn’t you?”

And as always, recalling too late just who it was he was talking to, Jason mentally kicked himself and returned fire with a petulant, “Oh shut up you know what I meant,” before he sat quietly beside Rori’s piano waiting for his prickling temper to smooth itself, heel bouncing. “So…” he interjected into the awkward silence that had rushed in after his words.

 _Christ, what’m I even doing here?_ He heaved an internal groan. _Spend all this time trying to_ avoid _running into him and in the end what do I do? Waltz right into his waiting clutches. Man, I should’ve just gone back to bed…_

It always proved interesting to try to find something to say to Rori without it coming off as, well, horny. Or as something that would produce an answer with far too much extra information attached – most of which would undoubtedly pertain to sex, knowing the vampire. With a hefty mental sigh, Jason realized and somewhat reluctantly admitted that he was pulling up a total blank. Evidently, making conversation with overly hormonal vampires in the inhumanely early hours of the morning was not his forte. At all. Not that he should have been surprised.

Luckily for him, however, Rori was just about as loquacious as they came, saving their small-chat conversation from spiralling into the deepest pits of awkward-silence hell with a simple question as he leaned forward, weight braced upon his arms, his head cocked slightly to the side. The glowing cigarette dangled forgotten between his first two fingers, birthing trailing wisps of smoke that danced evocatively in the frail, wavering illumination of the night.

“So, what motivated you to grace little old me with a visit, hmm?” A single dark brow climbed in an impish arch. “Looking for a means to relieve some stress, perhaps?”

Jason cringed at the vampire’s salacious tone. “Eh, no,” he muttered. His voice softened, however, and lost the defensive edge it had gained so suddenly as he continued, picking idly at the padded leather of the bench between his parted thighs, struggling to smother the mounting appeal of laying his fingers, even if only for a moment, upon the keys of the vampire’s piano. Just to plink out a note or two. Maybe see if he could peck some version of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ into being. “I just, I dunno…” he mumbled with a shrug, “heard the music and wanted to see who was playing something so sad.” The moment – no – the very instant those words slipped past his lips, Jason mentally kicked himself square in the head; the shield that rose into place within Rori’s glacial green gaze was so patently obvious it almost hurt.

_Ugh… Way to go, dip-shit._

Rori dipped his head with a small, throaty noise as he took another meditative pull on his cigarette, turning once again to gaze off into the rain.

 _God dammit, Jason, you ‘n your big fuckin’ mouth._ When his psychological admonishments failed to accomplish anything more than to yet further entrench them in an uncomfortable silence, Jason cleared his throat, firmly reminded himself to keep his tongue in check, and spoke up again as his fingers uneasily drummed themselves against the bench. “Really coming down out there, isn’t it?”

The weather was always a safe topic in any situation – completely nonsexual, too.

After a time of oppressive hush, Rori finally replied, his voice quiet and submissive. “Mm, yes, it is. Tell me,” he redirected his luminescent gaze to Jason again, and Jason did his level best to ignore the tiny shiver that skittered down the back of his neck as the thunder grumbled in discontent. “The wounds, the ones on your back…”

 _Well_ that _wasn’t at all random._

“What about them?”

“Have they healed yet?”

Jason straightened a little from his comfortable slouch, eyes growing ever so slightly wider as his heart cramped in his chest, and he averted his gaze elsewhere. Why the hell would Rori care? The damned things were his doing in the first place. Shoving aside the abrupt outburst of bitterness with a subdued breath, he answered politely, “No, they haven’t. Still hurts like a bitch when they’re stretched, thanks.”

Okay, so he’d abandoned the polite approach. Perhaps inflicting a bit of well-deserved guilt would help to dissuade the vampire the next time he felt the urge to turn Jason into his personal scratching post. One could always hope, anyways. _Hope springs eternal – just like Rori’s libido._

That wasn’t exactly a _comforting_ thought, but it was damned well true.

Before he knew it, the vampire had vanished entirely from the window, only to reappear behind him on the bench a fraction of a second later; it was an immediate reaction for Jason to arch forward with a harsh gasp when shockingly cool hands slid the fabric away from his disfigured back. The man was a walking icebox even _without_ the added chill of lounging on a window seat with a torrential downpour falling outside at almost four in the morning –

“Hey! Whattaya think you’re –” Jason instinctively yelped, his body readying to whip around and dance away from the invaders. And were it not for the arm that Rori had wrapped around his torso, he probably would have made it through with those plans.

As the vampire hauled him back against his chest, a strangled punch of breath fled through his gritted teeth and tears stung his clenched eyes when the scabs were all simultaneously ripped open anew. Rori’s hands glided freely across his back now, fully exposed and rippling with shivers of cold intermingling with scalding ribbons of pain, long fingers lightly tracing the hideous claw marks they’d left behind.

“What the _fuck,_ Rori!?” Jason growled from between clenched teeth. At the sound of Rori’s hushed, distraught voice behind him, however, the searing needle-pricks softened, and the taut rigidity that had seized his muscles gradually melted away.

“Gods, I’m so sorry,” the vampire thickly uttered. Cool lips pressed themselves to a cut on his shoulder, weeping blood now, and Jason watched from the edges of his peripheral vision as Rori’s brows furrowed in profound remorse. “I can’t believe how cruel I was to you. I am so very, terribly sorry, Jason.”

Head bowing slightly beneath the misery coating the Englishman’s words, Jason released a begrudging sigh as he rubbed his face and weakly batted the man’s apology aside. Christ, he was too tired to be dealing with this shit right now. “Look, don’t worry about it, all right? Bad shit happened – let’s just leave it at that. What’s done is done.”

“Jason, why do you let me do this to you?”

Jason said nothing, his mind scrambling desperately for the words he needed, and yet even with that, he was left speechless. Part of him yearned to angrily accuse Rori of repeatedly taking him against his will, to point out that he hadn’t really been given a choice in the matter; another part simply wanted to… When his thoughts surfaced with their imaginary hands laden with nothing, he remained silent and replied with only a hushed expulsion of breath.

“I can understand that you must hate me for what I’ve done,” came the vampire’s soft, dejected voice again.

“What? Of course no- well… No. Look, I don’t fucking _know_ , all right?” He finally growled with a scowl. “I don’t know what I think of you.” _Yeah, that was_ so _smooth and coherent, Jason. Way to be. Ten points to me, please. Fucking Christ._

Rori said nothing, remaining as a silent spectre lingering for what seemed like an eternity at his aching, shivering back.

Licking his lips, Jason became aware of a poignant nerve vehemently lashing out at the walls of his stomach. _What_ do _I think of him? I mean… he’s put me through absolute hell pretty much since I moved in here. For that reason alone, I should_ _hate him. He’s given me scars, but…_ The breath that had become suspended within his throat as he pondered the notion slipped away. _He’s taken them away again, too. And aside from what happened a couple of days ago, I can’t remember the last time he’s even been remotely violent about…_ Something tentatively curled in on itself in his soul, _taking me to his bed. All that taken into consideration… Christ, what_ should _you think about someone like that?_

Within the depths of his mind, within the swirling vortex of questions about himself and about Rori, Jason was oblivious to the hushed murmurs of his name until it was accompanied by the lingering caress born from a chill hand against his naked pelvis.

Oh yeah, that kicked his daydreaming ass back into reality _real_ fast.

“Wha-!?” Practically throwing himself to the side against the ivory keys of the piano – sending a sour, banging chord belching throughout the otherwise silent room with his elbows – Jason pinned the startled vampire with a wide-eyed stare.

“So sorry,” Rori humbly smiled. “Is this any better?”

“What?” Jason brainlessly reiterated, knowing that if he looked into a mirror, he’d see a face full of absolute… blank.

“Touch your back,” the Englishman calmly offered with the slightest cock of his head. “Stretch… anything – other than banging on my piano, please,” he added as a rushed afterthought.

Realizing just what continued to remain awkwardly beneath his elbows, he jerkily leaned forward with a sharp hiccup from the piano, sent a sheepish glance with the flicker of a smile at the redhead, and twisted an arm around behind him and up the back of his shirt. Anything to keep himself from noticing just how embarrassingly _hot_ the edges of his ears were getting.

As he ran the tip of a finger timidly across the middle of his back, where once the biggest of the claw marks had been, he felt bewildered disbelief falling over him in a light, silken veil. Instead of the rough, clotted texture of a scab, all that remained was a smooth, warm lump, inconsequential in comparison to what it had been just scant seconds beforehand. _Wait…_ He rubbed it again with another finger, harder this time purely out of incredulity, and twisted as though to glance at it. _What the…?_ Nothing.

Taken aback, he moved higher, sliding over his shoulder blades where a cluster of smaller – albeit just as aggravating – scratches had existed. There was nothing. Not even a bump. His spine, shoulders, mid and lower back, his hips… There was nothing left. The bloody trenches that Rori’s nails had left in his back were gone; all that met his exploration was the smooth, uninterrupted texture of his own skin.

Jason whirled about on the bench in astonishment to gape at the minute smile plucking at Rori’s ashen lips. “What’d you…?”

Eerily pale emerald irises flitted down to where a rather sizable gash was slowly stitching itself back together along the porcelain countenance of the vampire’s forearm. Sinister stains coated the long fingers of his opposing hand, and the sight of the immortal’s blood evoked a myriad of dark, confusing reactions in Jason. His wide-eyed gaze once more engaged glittering frost-green irises.

“You didn’t…”

The redhead was cleaning the blood from his flesh, running the satin pad of his tongue provocatively up the length of stained fingers, a tiny, blatantly suggestive smile quirking at the edges of his mouth. “I did,” the vampire complacently hummed, sucking the last of his supernatural blood from the crook of one of his fingers. “I sealed your wounds with my blood.” An amused, airy laugh escaped his throat, and after the sad expression he had been wearing since Jason caught sight of him… Well, even _he_ could admit that it was a pleasant change. “How else do you suppose those marks would vanish so quickly, you ninny? After all, I’m not a sorcerer – I work with blood, not magic.”

He was just too stunned. His brain refused to function as the Englishman returned his attention to his healing forearm, lapping and sucking the spilt crimson essence from his wrist with the same casual elegance as a great ivory cat grooming its fur.

“But… b-but… _why_?” All right, so it was a rather fumbling and graceless way to put it – particularly since the man had just had the gall to call him a ninny, of all the childish things – but still, it worked, didn’t it? No point in trying to be all eloquent about it. After all, he wasn’t the one from the sixteenth century, here – and he was certainly no Shakespeare, unlike his current company.

Having deemed himself sufficiently cleansed, the grievous expression, as though unwillingly summoned by his words, returned to Rori’s countenance. “The very least I could do after inflicting those horrid wounds is take them away again, yes? How do you feel?”

Without considering the very possible – not to mention _likely_ – ramifications of his actions, Jason fluidly slipped the rest of the way out of his shirt, tossing it carelessly aside as he jumped away from the bench to pump his arms up and down, stretching this way and that, rolling his shoulders and basking in the blissful cessation of pain and discomfort that had recently plagued him.

There were no words to describe how such a freedom made his spirit soar with elation; there was no tugging, no tearing… No disconcerting tightness lacing its fingers maliciously across his back, only to leave him that much more aware of their origins. They had been a reminder, those wounds, and one that Jason had begun to despise with an increasing amount of vehemence as he struggled to live his current life to the best of his ability. They’d left him stiff, mindful of his own movements and clenching his jaw against the wash of pain that often rebuked him for not being mindful enough. The worry of blood seeping around the edges of torn scabs had been virtually never-ending, and he couldn’t count the number of times he’d fretted that such a careless mistake would soon leave its evidence either blazing on the back of his shirt in a deep, garnet stain, or sucking its fabric against his lacerated and weeping skin. He hadn’t even been able to use the pool unless he was on his own – he hadn’t dared to, even when he was – knowing all too well the kinds of questions those wounds would draw from the other tenants.

To be liberated from all of that… Christ. There wasn’t a word in the English language yet that would do such a sensation justice. He felt like running laps around the house, barrelling over railings and scaling the banisters; he felt like climbing the very goddamn walls to perch like the King of the World atop the wicked spires of the Manor’s roof. He felt like he could do just about anything…!

When one of Rori’s elegant, powerful hands, however, trapped his wrists above his head, every last modicum of the joy frolicking through his system like a knot of mischievously tussling ferrets ceased instantaneously. He froze solid, the icy touch of dread spearing down into the depths of his being and lodging itself there, hooking frigid spines into his core.

The vampire, without warning, appeared before him, a cool palm melting intimately against his hip as, with each step the immortal took forward, Jason took one – or more – away.

“Uh, Rori…”

The solid arrival of his healed back against the wood paneling of the wall put a swift end to his feeble attempts at retreat. He should have known better than that, anyways. Rori was a vampire, for Christ’s sake. There was no simple “run away” option for this kind of scenario.

What he would have given in sheer euphoria for life to be a little more like a video game just then.

“Rori,” an uncertain, wavering grin took to Jason’s mouth, “what’re you-”

The immortal leaned down and in, ever so torturously and slowly while Jason’s heart thundered deafeningly in his chest, until cool lips could brush along his throat. The hand on his hip began to gently knead him, stroking cool fingertips over his skin, massaging muscle and bone with his large hand in a way he’d thought would only feel weird. Instead…

He decided it would be safer to simply ignore the salacious warmth stirring beneath his flesh, as well as the way his ears began flushing a very unflattering shade of red.

Yet, for all of the discomfort the situation was causing him, Jason couldn’t entirely refute, nor deny, the fact that he’d had it coming. _Well god dammit, kid. That’s gotta be the most retarded thing you’ve ever done while he’s around. Sure, let’s make the bugger horny and rip off our shirt like we’re screaming,_ “boink me again, vampire man, boink me again!” _Mind you, when I actually take the time to think about it it’s not always that ba-… ah, shit._ Eyes clenching shut in disbelief at his own inanity, Jason recalled one rather significant factor that he had, in the throes of his jubilation, overlooked entirely as he felt Rori’s caressing lips curl into a languid smirk against the curve of his neck. _Jason you dumb shit how could you forget-_

 _That I can read minds?_ An addictive mouth pressed a lethargic kiss to his carotid artery. _Mm, yes, and if you really, honestly do not mind my making love to you, I would be more than willing to grant you your wish, dear one. Consider it my way of…_ The tip of a slick, wanton tongue emerged to teasingly brush against the flesh just beneath the corner of his jaw, and the vampire’s hand slid down to amorously squeeze one of his buttocks. Hard. _Making amends._

Jason jolted, his entire body going tight as an over-tuned guitar string as a fresh wave of heat surged into his face. A forced, uneasy chuckle was thrust past his lips as he tried to lean his ass out of Rori’s hand – a task which proved to be virtually impossible, as it would turn out, but it didn’t stop him from trying. Unfortunately, that also meant he was wriggling his pelvis forward, nearer to the vampire’s tall, dominating form. _That’s_ not _an invitation, that is not an invitation, that is most definitely not_ _a goddamn invitation…!_

“U-uh, no, no, really, that’s okay – and can you let go of my ass, please? I think I’ll pass, but uh, thanks all the same, y’know? Not _quite_ what I had in mind for tonight.”

 _Oh you filthy little liar…_ The more hormonal faction of his thoughts hissed.

 _What the_ fuck! _I’m not lyin’ about_ shit _, you fucking-!_

“You really mustn’t contradict yourself so, dear one.” The vampire at his neck sent him a prurient glance from the corners of his unnervingly glacial eyes; the smug smirk on his lips began to widen, and the Englishman’s hand loosened just enough to appreciatively, thoughtfully – almost _reverently_ – rub itself over the curve of his buttock. “I admit that I become a tad confused sometimes in discerning the truth from a whimsical, fleeting notion.”

“You’re a fuckin’ liar,” Jason spat. _Christ_ did it ever piss him off, hearing that absolute and spirited complacency in the libertine’s rich, unambiguously sexual voice. It was almost enough to make him cease his uncomfortable squirming beneath the vampire’s hand, jerking his wrists against the restraint of Rori’s iron fingers – but not quite. “You _know_ that you know that I know exactly what you know is real or not because you know that I’ll know immediately that I’ll know you’ll know perfectly how to screw with my head so that I won’t know anymore what... you, uh…”

 _Oh, fuck._ His entire body stiffened against the wall as he smacked the back of his skull into the darkly stained wooden paneling, his lids screwed tightly shut in defeat. _Way to go,_ he hoarsely uttered to himself. _Let’s just confuse yourself a little more, why don’cha!_

Why in the _fuck_ did his brain have to shut down so goddamn _willingly_ when in close proximity to the undead bloodsucker?! For the love of bleedin’ Christ, _why_!?

Of course, this entire train of thought was brutally derailed when lascivious lips pressed a sweltering kiss to one of Jason’s stretched earlobes, trapping the simple black tunnel within pearly teeth to give it a goading tug; the Englishman roguishly began to work his way back down Jason’s neck, those dangerous fangs scraping his flesh with just enough pressure to send a rippling wave of shivers racing relays along his spine. Helpless against the painfully obvious shudder that gripped his body, Jason shifted his unsteady, drooping gaze toward the rain-streaked window, imitating his assaulter’s previous position and barricading himself deep within his own mind.

_Just don’t look at him._

Firm fingers descended along Jason’s hip – _Don’t…_ his thoughts pitifully uttered – and as they did so, the fabric of his boxers gave way beneath their strength; with a single, swift move, the immortal’s touch found itself flush against hot, bare skin. Stiffening uncontrollably, Jason found his body involuntarily arching against the black-clad vampire with a hushed, tremulous groan building in his throat.

Really, all he was doing was trying to escape that cold fucking hand. Last he’d checked, trying to escape from something that cold when it was that near to one’s groin was a perfectly sane, rational thing to be doing, and Jason would sooner blow his own brains out than admit otherwise.

“You know how I adore it when you’re confused, my love,” Rori silkily whispered, his voice no more than a breath as plush lips skimmed along the curve of his jaw, warming against his skin. Cool fingertips stroked the vulnerable flesh of his palms – pinned inexorably to the wall above his head, no matter how they struggled – just as their brothers, locked in the teasing caress of ardour, carved light, convoluted designs into the taut sensitive surface of his pelvis, all the while continuing their slow, but steady descent. 

“R-Rori, wait…”

Lips softer than any rose petal barely moved against his flesh, merely tickling nerves already standing on end, already sensitized to the point of unleashing a volley of shivers at even the slightest provocation. “Isn’t this what you wanted?” The vampire’s husky voice seemed far too loud for being so gentle – the bursts of his breath somehow warm as they brushed against his skin. It felt as though it were reaching inside of him, taking hold of his heart and soul and cradling him in the intimate, voluptuous embrace of a lover.  

“N-no. Rori, just… Wait, stop, please.” No matter how tightly he pressed himself back into the wall, he couldn’t escape those fingers, delicately drawing things on his skin as they wandered lower, teasing harried nerve endings, stoking higher the flames kissing at his veins – and drawing ever nearer to the most treacherous part of himself that would inevitably betray him. “Rori… _Stop_.” The hand, its chill fingers resting dangerously low, froze. A pallid façade, illuminated like a beacon in the undulating darkness of the room, lifted for white-emerald irises to peruse his flustered expression.

_Just… For the love of God, Jason, don’t look at him._

**-x-**

Even with the distress evidently marking Jason’s countenance, Rori still found him to be achingly beautiful; the striking contrast of his eyes, the expressive shape of his mouth, the lean, sculpted figure of the broad planes of his face… Smoothly releasing the teenager’s delectable, scarred wrists, Rori’s hands slid carefully to his waist, no matter how it pained him to be drawn away from the sweltering carnal warmth that had been just beyond the reach of his fingertips.

“Jason?”

The brunette might as well have flashed the most flagrant signs of rejection before his face. He refused to meet his eyes; his minutely parted lips remained still, and yet they trembled an amount that never would have been noticed by another mere human being. Thank the Gods he was nothing as frail and unaffected and pathetically _thick-headed_ as one’s average mortal. Although, with all of his impeccable senses as one of the Damned, there was no way for him to ignore the utmost expression of a carefully hidden fear portrayed on the muse’s striking countenance as he uncertainly folded his arms into his naked, heaving torso. As elementary as it would have been, Rori resisted the urge to slip into the guitarist’s mind and pick out whatever he desired. If he continued to indulge such impulsive whimsies, the boy would never learn to trust him.

And more than anything, he wanted his sweet, charming muse to willingly grant him at least that much. One could be manipulated or tantalized into giving up their body – and by god, he did so enjoy enticing the boy, baiting his baser nature and watching him shiver and writhe under his influence – but he also knew, all too well, that one could never be forced into surrendering their trust. After all, forced trust was never really trust at all, but an _illusion_ of trust no doubt cast to harbour a burgeoning malice, and he didn’t want that. He didn’t _want_ Jason to hate him, but…  

“Jason.” Taking the boy’s chin in his fingers, Rori turned Jason’s face back up to him and pulled a soft, winning smile onto his lips as he bent his head to plant an innocuous kiss on his flushed cheekbone. That the muse tolerated it, endured it without trying to withdraw or cringe away, was indication enough that things had, indeed, almost gone too far. “I was just kidding.” Jason’s entrancing gaze snapped to his, flashing defiantly within the gloom against his attempt to make light of the situation.

“You have a sick sense of humour, O’Connor,” he petulantly snarled.

Rori shrugged, pressing his lips to the cringing musician’s forehead with a teasing smirk. “I like to think so.”

 

**-x-**

“You mentioned before that you couldn’t sleep, dear one. Is there anything that you might like to discuss – perhaps lift a weight from your shoulders? God knows I’ve been around long enough; I may be of some help in easing your mind.”

He’d hardly even noticed how he had trapped his thumbnail between his teeth for a thoughtful nibble until he tried to speak with it remaining there. Releasing it with an awkward glance as he absently rubbed the pad of his index finger over the blunt tip, Jason cleared his throat and returned his attention to the beaten wooden table. “Uh, well… It’s kinda hard to explain.”

“We’ve time enough.” The vampire gave a languid shrug. “You can’t sleep, and I’ve no need to.”

“Mm…”

Jason stared down into the creamy fluid lazily circling in the warm porcelain mug cradled in his palms, only vaguely aware of the rain that continued to pound at the windows. A ghastly pale hand extended into the frail golden circle of light cast by a single candle and retrieved an intricate crystal wineglass, drawing it into the darkness as the vampire took a dignified sip of its inky carmine contents. Just beyond the veil of shadows, Jason could see the pallid, distinctive shape of Rori’s forearms, his face and neck, as he thoughtfully observed the crystal before he set it down, folded his arms on the tabletop, and materialized slowly once again in the candlelight with a broad, contemplative smile.

During their stroll to the kitchen – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say Rori following Jason on _his_ stroll to the kitchen – they discovered that they truly were the only waking members of the Manor, a detail that presented them with ample room and peace to discuss or argue over whatever came to mind without embarrassment or distraction. Most distractions, in any case, for it was amazingly simple to sidetrack the likes of Rori O’Connor, something of which Jason was all too aware. Throughout the house, the vampire had insisted on playfully teasing him, groping him, or shamelessly acting upon whatever other impulsive whimsies had surfaced in his obscure, enigmatic psyche.

Sufficed to say, that left a rather broad spectrum of notions to be explored. Nevertheless, to the vampire’s credit, only once did he corner Jason against a wall to slowly, deeply kiss him in spite of his feeble, utterly ineffectual protests.

Now they sat across from each other at the scarred rectangular table with their drinks, Rori’s gaze trained with a nearly discomforting keenness on Jason’s candlelit countenance as he studied his mug of hot cocoa as if buried somewhere in its depths were the secrets to unlock the universe.

Hell, Jason would have been more than elated to settle for a way to keep the insufferably horny vampire at arm’s length – at _least_. To hell with lemonade; he’d take Life’s munificent supply of lemons and empty their juices in Rori’s goddamn _eyes_ if he thought it would do him any good. Too bad he knew better, because some days it would have made him the happiest man alive to watch that overgrown leech fall to the ground while writhing in agony and clawing at his face. Not that he was feeling particularly _bitter_ or anything… But beggars couldn’t be choosers, and he would just have to settle with and begrudgingly choke down what he got.

When his mind rewarded the sentiment with a mental picture that was something less than chaste, Jason only just barely managed to restrain the disgusted grimace thrashing its way towards the surface of his countenance. _Oh, ew. Just… ugh… Do not want._

“Is something the matter, Jason?”

Wrenched from the gag-worthy mental image by the vampyric rake’s smooth, curious voice, Jason’s wide-eyed gaze flitted up to pin the immortal, patiently waiting, as always, with a blank stare – the very picture of a ‘deer in the headlights’ moment at its finest. “What?”

“You look like you’ve a foul taste in your mouth,” Rori lazily commented, wearing his trademark smirk all the while.

“Uh…” Christ, how was he supposed to reply to something like that? _‘Sorry, my brain just fed me a metaphor for making the best out of life when all of a sudden it turned into an analogy for choking down bloody vampire jizz’?_ _I think not._ Giving a clipped shake of his head – not only to rid his mind of such a perverse thought but to, as well, manhandle it back to its original subject of contemplation – Jason scrunched his eyes shut and distractedly rubbed his face into the palm of his hand. “No… No, sorry – I was just…” He gave his head another shake in an attempt to regain his focus and quietly grimaced in thought. “Just trying to think of how to describe it. That’s all.”

“But of course.”

Jesus, he didn’t even need to look at the man to know that the expression he was wearing was only going to tempt Jason further to throw something at him. Like his mug, full of scalding hot chocolate. He could hear it in Rori’s voice, positively dripping as it was with that inherent sense of smugness he was forever toting around. To be honest, Jason kind of wanted to punch him anyways, just for good measure. He was too damn smart, too perceptive, for his own fucking good – even _without_ the use of his telepathy – Jason quietly brooded, bristling. People like Rori deserved to be shot, even if only for the comfort and peace of mind of everyone else on the goddamn planet.   

 _I’m just startin’ to like that whole, ‘sacrifice one for the good of the many,’ philosophy more and more,_ he wryly mused to himself. 

“Well… I don’t know.” Suddenly feeling both hassled and aggravated, Jason abstractedly rubbed at his forehead, sharing a vexed look with his mug of hot chocolate. “It’s hard to really put into words,” he absently mumbled, a tiny frown coming and going amongst his brows as his mind raced along, feebly attempting to collect the recklessly wandering thoughts that had been preoccupying him.

“Shall I assist you?”

Jason peeked up at the vampyric Lothario from beneath his brows. “You mean read my mind?”

“Something of the sort I suppose, yes.”

“No.” And once more, his gaze returned to his drink.

Rori shrugged and sipped from his glass again, unable to be any more apparent that the shortness of Jason’s comment hadn’t perturbed him in the least. “Fair enough, dear one.” The vampire shot him a sly glance, the hint of a meaningful smirk dancing about naked on the edges of his quirked lips, “’tis normal, after all, for young men – much like yourself, might I add – to protect their fantasies from prying eyes.”

Pointedly dismissing the man’s comment with a terse sigh and a sharp, flicking glance, Jason diverted his gaze back down to his mug, watching with ardent interest the way the steam curled up into the atmosphere. With an air of utter preoccupation, he waved his fingers through the frail curtain, marvelling at the brushing sensation the warm, phantom-like tendrils cast across his skin. “Well, what exactly,” he uttered slowly, careful to put the correct words to his thoughts, arranging and analyzing them in his head prior to voicing them. Not that it usually helped. Why he was even broaching the subject with Rori of all people in the first place was beyond him entirely. “What exactly would you do if…  you know, if you weren’t really sure if you were interested in someone or not, but you wanted to find out one way or another?”

Dark brows shot up. “You’re asking _my_ opinion?”

“Sort of, I guess. Yeah.”

 _I’m only two years old, okay? So sue me if I’m not the most enlightened being on the face of the planet,_ his thoughts petulantly grumbled. 

The same brows suddenly furrowed into an expression of concentration as a long white finger absently drew a dramatic circle in the air as though for clarification. A finger that, Jason couldn’t help thinking, belonged to hands that had made themselves intimately familiar with his body on more than one occasion. He fought down a guilty flush and replaced his focus where it belonged. “And I am to understand that you mean ‘interested’ in the context of harbouring a somewhat more… _visceral_ interest in this person, yes?”

A blatant grimace slapped itself across Jason’s face. “Christ Ror d’you have to put it like that? Y’make it sound like I wanna… _eat_ them, or something.”

“Yes, I must put it like that,” the vampire sanguinely replied. “And I believe mentioning a desire to ‘eat’ them could be very appropriate, depending on the context in which it’s used.”

Unmoved, contrasting irises gave themselves an impudent roll. “Ch’yeah, sure, ‘ _visceral’_ interest… why not?” Jason just hoped that Rori couldn’t see the way his ears started to burn at the question. Knowing him, though, what with the vampirism and all… He probably _had_ noticed it – in acute, high-definition detail, no less. 4K resolution – biological Blu-ray – and all that.  

God… There were just some times when living with someone more unearthly than a thousand-year-old block of cheese really blew. Living with someone as otherworldly as a vampire…? Well… He didn’t even think there _was_ a word for how much _that_ sucked.

Pun not intended.

The vampire leaned back in his chair, withdrawing from the candle’s dim glow with his fingers arched before his face in rapt contemplation. “I suppose that if you really are keen on learning whether you are or are not, in fact, intimately interested, you could spend some more time with this person, pay attention to your body’s reactions when you happen to be around them. Do a little… psychological and/or otherwise emotional probing, if you will. Or,” a single hand separated to pose emphatically in mid-air, “you could simply hop a few corners, go for the old-fashioned approach, pop into bed with them for a little rumble-tumble amongst the bed sheets and find out that way.”

Jason’s first reaction was to grimace. “Yeah thanks, no,” he snorted with a pert roll of his eyes. “Looking for something a little less… trashy, here, Ror. What’s that supposed to prove, anyways?” The instant the vampire opened his mouth, Jason lifted a hand and cut him off. “Wait. Forget I asked – I don’t wanna know.”

The immortal, however, continued unabated, his voice as cool and as composed as it had been before – although his smirk _had_ gotten a bit wider, Jason warily realized, and that never boded well. “Do you get nervous or anxious at all, dearest Jason?”

Barely even comprehending that he’d been doing it in the first place, Jason’s eyes widened as he mechanically ceased picking at his fingers and stiffly moulded them back around the cup to absorb the relaxing heat that radiated from it. He hoped to god that Rori hadn’t noticed that, either – which wasn’t very likely, but he could still hope, right? “Not really. I mean, maybe a _little_ ,” he swiftly corrected himself with a forcedly lackadaisical half-shrug. “But not hugely, no. Besides, that doesn’t mean anything. Some people just make you nervous.”

Holy Christ, he was becoming the very bloody master of understatements and contradictions. _Yay. Double the number, double the fun_. Not.

“Is there anything you feel apart from that?”

“Well,” a deep, slow breath drew itself into his lungs, “when they get close, it’s like there’s this… _ball_ of something, in my stomach.” Man alive, was this ever awkward. _Alright Brain, remind me again why I came to Rori of all people about this. And why the hell am I just spouting all this shit off, anyways?!_

Jesus, he sounded like some prepubescent boy asking his father for advice on some first-grade crush. However, Jason had hit puberty what seemed like eons ago, the thought of Rori as his father was just… twisted, and the current issue at hand was most certainly nowhere near the same level of innocence as a first-grade crush. First-grade crushes, that he could imagine, had never involved… Well. _That_ was the other part of it.

“And,” Jason took a shaky breath, reluctant to give voice to his next thoughts. In fact, he was pretty sure doing so was close to the worst idea he’d ever had, but for whatever reason, he continued, as though his mouth had slipped its leash with no plans on returning. “I… I have these… _dreams_ , about them,” he muttered, rubbing the heel of his hand into his forehead before it fisted in his hair; he had to force himself to swallow around the lodge of solid aridity that had anxiously taken up residence in his throat.

Some part of his mind that was still rational and sane was screaming in horror at every word that slid from his lips, but hey – what else was new? Maybe, if his phrasing of what he really meant was vague enough… Maybe Rori wouldn’t get it.

 _Ch’yeah, right. And pigs can fly._ But beyond all rationale, as if suddenly imbued with a will entirely of its own, his mouth kept talking.

“They’re not like normal dreams,” Jason uncomfortably continued, his fingers restlessly fidgeting as they remained buried in the dishevelled locks of his dusty brown hair, no doubt a subconscious attempt to shield himself from Rori’s intense gaze while his free hand randomly gestured about as he spoke. “They’re… different. And it’s as though they’re right there with me, in reality, but… really, it’s all in the dream. It… It seems like everything that happens in the dream happens outside of it, too – like some sort of twisted déjà vu or something.”

Without even needing to see his face, Jason knew with every jot of his being that Rori’s left brow was raised in intrigue. “Is that so?” was all he said, his voice a low, purring, and disturbingly sensual drawl. It screamed implications, and it was this thought that buried itself into his mind, blossoming like a seed planted in chemically altered fertilizer the very moment it made itself known.

Utterly unwilling to take the risk of looking up and unintentionally meeting eyes with the vampire, being windows to the soul and all that, Jason inelegantly cleared his throat and nodded.

“Tell me,” Rori stated in a curt, precise manner, “you’d be speaking of – what do you mortals call them? – ‘wet dreams’, I imagine. ‘Nocturnal emissions,’ and such. Am I correct, Jason?” God, he loved the oh-so professional quote marks the vampire made with his fingers; the man must have been born for that gesture because his long hands pulled it off beautifully.

In spite of this thought, nervous laughter bubbled up from Jason’s throat – he could feel the heat flooding to his face as he answered. “Eh…” _Wait a minute…_ Sitting bolt-straight against his chair, Jason supposed he should have been thankful he’d tugged his mug in front of him at the last minute; otherwise, his arms would have had a very unpleasant experience when they stiffly smacked themselves down on the table. “ _Dammit_ Rori, stop reading my fucking mind!”

A low chuckle emanated from the shadows as a pale, disembodied hand extended into the small circle of candlelight to rest its fingers around the bloom of the wineglass. “Oh, I didn’t have to read your mind, dear one.” An audible smirk came to Rori’s lips within the frail gold murk obscuring his face. “Your expression told me everything I needed to know, and you, my darling nightingale – by not only assuming I suspect but indeed _expecting_ something wicked of me – confirmed it without my even having to lift a finger.” The vampire let a delicate veil of silence drape itself over their conversation as voracious, libidinous eyes consumed him whole from the other side of the table. His voice, when it interrupted that fragile hush, had plummeted down into the very depths of sensuality, making Jason’s heart skip a beat as it languidly rumbled forth from the Englishman’s lips in a deep, throaty purr. “Not to mention, the quite luscious smell of your arousal… Dare I say, nearly enough so to inspire some wet dreams all its own.”

Stare.

Twitch.

Twitch-twitch.

He really fucking hated that man sometimes.

Settling back in his chair to mutter something about stupid, manipulative, blood-sucking/lecherous cockroaches, Jason stubbornly folded his arms and glared at his mug; another husky laugh from Rori punctuated the silence.

“You know, I adore it when you look so flustered, with that delectable shade of red flushing your ears. It makes me want for nothing more than to kiss you and watch that blush deepen.”

An indignant heat blossomed yet hotter in his ears and not long after, beneath the flesh of his cheeks, granting the vampire’s request at the image his words had invoked, and the thoughts that followed soon after. A petulant prickle began to dance over Jason’s spine, hackles raised, when Rori’s throaty laugh continued.

“Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. Laugh it up, Chuckles!” Peevishly readjusting the position of his arms against his chest, Jason glared off to the side, wishing for all of the world that he could merely will away the red in his face so the goddamn corpse would stop laughing at him like that.

“Hmm, forgive me, love. I couldn’t help myself.” A fond sigh escaped into the quiet as a single hand retreated into the shadows to wipe away the imaginary tears Jason could all too clearly imagine beading the pallid Englishman’s dark, thick lashes.

“Never can,” Jason pointedly muttered under his breath.

“I suppose not,” the vampire serenely agreed. “But nor can you.”

At long last, Jason dared to force his mismatched irises back up to where he assumed Rori’s puckish gaze would be beyond the murky veil of shadows, and fixed him with a vexed glare. “Oh I can help myself plenty, thanks.”

The fingers on the wineglass slid to the stem, gracefully gliding up and down in a manner much, _much_ too provocative for Jason’s liking. “The way you do after these dreams, perhaps?” That lazy, drawling voice purred.

Ripping his eyes away from the hypnotizing movements of Rori’s hand, Jason blinked at the shadows and then stubbornly tore his gaze away to glower into the depths of the kitchen surrounding them. “Cheap mind-reading asshole,” he snorted bitterly. “My private business is _my_ private business meaning ‘stop being such a fucking mind-reading pervert!’”

Leaning forward, the Englishman revealed the smirk that had been dancing an intimate waltz across his lips. And the sight of those lips, as soft and tempting as they looked in the candlelight, made Jason’s stomach flip in ways both negative and…

Whoa. _No_. He was not getting butterflies because the bastard was _smiling_ at him. That was most definitely not a warm, fuzzy sensation overflowing from somewhere within the deeper pits of his being, heating his blood, and…

“My my, what a brazen mouth you have, dear one.” Celadon eyes watched the long, pallid fingers caress the stem of his wineglass through a veil of dark lashes for a moment before flicking back to Jason’s face. A slow smile tugged at the corners of the immortal’s mouth. “You cannot even begin to comprehend how it compels me to test whether its kisses are feeling just as brazen.” Without another word, the walking corpse vanished, and a split second later, Jason found his chair jarringly thrust away from the table with a loud scrape of wood against tile and a tall black figure looming over him; strong, exposed white forearms became iron bars on either side of his body and large hands had seized the arms of the chair in a vice grip.

It wasn’t long however before cool fingers detached themselves, reaching up to teasingly caress the side of his neck, intense irises burning into his own. For some reason, he was unable to look away, to resist, when the vampire leaned down and captured Jason’s dazed mouth, dragging him with lusty hands into the mental oblivion of a heated kiss. A solid weight draped itself over his lids as they sleepily fluttered above chocolate and platinum discs; his heartbeat quickened as the vampire tipped his head just the slightest to one side and dove deeper, ravaging his mouth and dragging forth an involuntary moan from Jason’s throat.

The lips disengaged from his own, trailing to his jaw, teeth gently nipping at sensitized flesh as they went. Lightly panting, an inferno blazed to life in the core of his being as the vampire’s moist lips lingered below his left ear, kissing, sucking, nibbling, and roaming down his throat. Against his will, Jason felt his body minutely arch, begging for more even though his mind was shrieking with its hands slapped to its cheeks in awe-struck horror.

There was no denying it, though – Rori knew how to use his mouth.

_Wait. Wait a minute… No, this isn’t right._

A cold hand released the arm of the chair to ghost beneath the hem of Jason’s shirt, sending rioting shivers washing over his body in chilling waves as the vampire’s hedonistic touch caressed his side, lightly dragging glass-like nails down part of his back. Nevertheless, soon enough the immortal’s fingers had wandered yet again. Dancing away to stroke his thigh as a single knee leaned dangerously into the space between Jason’s legs, Rori’s mouth nuzzled at the junction of his shoulder and neck, nudging aside the metal beading of his necklace, before pressing a hungry kiss to flushed skin.

_Rori… stop it, please. Don’t do this…_

Unable to stop himself, as though his body had suddenly fallen victim to a lusting mind of its own, Jason’s arms betrayed him and wound around Rori’s neck, fingers burying themselves into smooth, luscious carmine hair as he pulled the vampire closer. A hushed, wavering gasp escaped when the immortal passionately scraped perfect teeth over his throat; until he realized that those dagger-like fangs hadn’t punctured his flesh, however, there was no ignoring the tension that had seized Jason’s muscles. The hand on his thigh slid up and smoothly glided beneath the waistband of his boxers as Rori’s knee nudged into him.

_Nn, stop it. For the love of god Rori please stop… Stop…_

As fiercely as he willed it, he couldn’t voice his protest; his throat clenched itself shut in defiance, permitting nothing more than an alien moan to come forth. Teeth grazed his shoulder, and the arm braced against the back of the chair, surrounding Jason in an inescapable embrace, teasingly brushed against one side of his neck, combing the tips of firm white fingers through the short strands of his hair.

_God damn you, Rori – stop!_

The instant a cool hand melted around his sex, cradling him in its palm, yanking a harsh gasp from Jason's chest, the vampire froze - almost as though he'd heard his silent pleas - and his hand withdrew. Arms suddenly devoid of strength or solidity limply slipped from around Rori's shoulders as he retreated into the shadows. Lids closed tightly over mismatched eyes, his head leaned back against the chair, Jason fought to still his frantically racing heart, to regain the breaths he'd lost in the encounter.

And as the fire that had ignited within him slowly drained away, he knew Rori had likewise, and just as silently, left the room.

 

**-x-**

For but a flickering instant without a shift in his stride as he moved up the last set of stairs and across the landing, his physical body dissolved into a fine, shadowy mist, seeping through the particles of the door, drifting like a phantom through the small antechamber, before he reclaimed his shape with a practiced haste on the other side.

Faltering in the darkness of his chambers, he permitted his eyes the rare opportunity to see nothing, to black out everything in the world around him until he lightly closed his lids with a crease in his brow and leaned back heavily against the door, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose in vexation. Cursing his inescapable habits within the depths of his mind, he allowed the proud posture he adopted every waking moment to gradually crumble at his feet until the only thing supporting him was the solidity of the wood at his back.

His desires had gotten the best of him yet again, and as always, he’d permitted them to run their course without a fight. His mind, of course, had been no better, manipulating Jason the way he yearned for the muse to act of his own accord. Jason had been unwilling, but his desire – made manifest in the Machiavellian tendrils of both his telekinesis and his telepathy – had continued to assault the poor lad, shaping his actions and no doubt a better portion of his thoughts, as well.

He’d come to him for _advice_ , for God’s sake. The boy had been utterly confused and Rori had barefacedly taken advantage of that!

 _So much for the intention of gaining his trust, you lecherous old demon,_ his mind scoffed, its silent voice abrasive and reprimanding enough to remind Rori of any number of the elders that had relentlessly scolded him as a child – to no avail, mind, but that had really nothing at all to do with this scenario. On the other hand, perhaps it was merely that part of him had accepted the notion that if the old priests could do nothing to make him repent, his own mind stood nary an ounce of a chance when faced with a task so daunting.

It was his _mind_ , for heaven’s sake! His mind controlled him, utterly and completely – controlled his thoughts, controlled his actions, controlled all the dirty little notions of just what he yearned with the entirety of his being to do to Jason, where he _craved_ to have his hands on him. The feverish intensity of his hunger to be _inside_ of him…

His fingers lightly moved to knead into his temple, and a weary sigh pulled at his dead lungs. “Since when did I become such a heartless old brigand? Might as well go back in time and start robbing poor elderly men or beating women over the head with a stone club for all the conscience I have,” he muttered quietly to himself, softly snorting beneath his unneeded breath as he buried his forehead into his palm with a quiet growl of frustration.

Out of the silence came a muted moan, resembling nothing more than heavenly music in his ears as it was accompanied by the silken shifting of bed sheets. Mint green eyes glanced up to see his lover fitfully sleeping, an elbow crooked beneath a blanket of beautiful golden hair as a slender arm languidly stretched out to where Rori should have been laying. Long, pale fingers dreamily caressed the cold, cream-colored sheets in a futile quest for the touch of his body.

The sight of his beloved arranged there warmed his heart, but the warmth rapidly faded as his thoughts returned to Jason’s face, his voice. A faint, disquieted breath escaped his lips, disappearing into thin air as he sagged back against the ornately carved door.

If only you possessed the same gifts as I, dear one, you would know how I regret treating you so. Yet I cannot help myself when in your presence… It is simply beyond my abilities and I can’t even say why…

A groggy voice broke the silence, shattering his reverie with its fuzzy, unfocused tone, albeit its sweetness was nigh undeniable. “Rori…?” And his name, carried so beautifully on those lips, made him yearn for nothing more than to trap that warm body within his arms and make love to it and its accompanying soul for all eternity.

“Here, darling.” Frosted celadon irises tore themselves away from the void of emptiness before him, a minute grin coming welcome to the corners of his mouth as his lover rose up onto an indolent elbow in their bed. A mane of long, wavy hair draped across his naked back like a cloak spun from the purest of gold as sleepy brown eyes wandered about the shadowy chamber. His lover couldn’t make him out, of course, but Rori could see him with nearly startling perfection. And he was, as always, a divinely exquisite sight to behold.

Strolling to the bedside, heart overflowing with the love he had for this enthralling creature, he gently took the Englishman’s balmy face in his hands and kissed him warmly on the lips.

As he broke away, lingering within a near enough distance to feel his lover’s sultry breath against his flesh, to bask in the exotic aromas of his mortal body, a tiny smile brought itself to the blonde’s supple mouth. “What’s kept you up so late, hmm? I was beginning to wonder whether you were ever going to come to bed.” Feverishly warm hands laid themselves over Rori’s own as the Englishman leaned into his lips once more.

“Mm, thoughts,” Rori confessed simply, giving his love one last chaste kiss before settling down on the edge of the mattress with a muted sigh. He could tell by the way the bed sank just slightly behind him, the sudden wash of warmth and scent, that his beauty had crawled to his knees. Heated arms wrapped themselves around his torso, slender fingers gently working to release the buttons of his shirt as a cheek nuzzled itself sleepily into the muscular expanse of back between his shoulder blades.

“Thoughts about what, love?” The lilting and beautifully sleep-roughened voice murmured, his hands steadily working their way down the line of buttons until there were none left.

Rori absently laid a hand on Julian’s as they smoothed themselves intimately against the naked flesh of his stomach, distractedly tracing the lines of long, agile fingers with a reverent caress. “Things of the past, things of the present. Tell me,” he shifted around, and Julian withdrew his hands to fold them peacefully in his lap until the vampire had settled again, facing him. He made for a mouth-watering image, his innocent lover; fair, coiling hair was in disarray as it fell around his shoulders, milky torso bare, tapered fingers delicately intertwined atop the sheet bunched at his waist. Oh, what he wouldn’t _give_ to merely forget everything that plagued his mind, all for but a few moments to savour his voluptuous lover in every way he could.

Pulling in a deep breath, Rori drew his wandering gaze from the Englishman’s figure and returned it to his placid face. “How can you stand my behaviour, Julian? How can you stand the fact that it’s common knowledge that I couldn’t be farther away from being shy about having multiple partners, or even taking them if they’re not entirely willing?” Gods, that one sounded nastier than he’d expected it to; it was hard to try and keep the grimace that fought to rise into his expression submerged. “That I’m a…” This time, however, his lip curled in revulsion as the word slipped through his lips, coated with thick distaste, “ _rake,_ a roué, a… _slut_ , as they call us hedonistic folk these days?”

Julian reached out, his fingers – filled with life and comfort – lightly laying themselves against Rori’s cold cheek. Clasping it to him, holding his lover’s hand where it offered solace and compassion, Rori would have known of the kind smile touching Julian’s lips even if he’d been blind, and it would have radiated the same light for him then as it did now. “I can’t deny that you have your flaws… But we are not solely our imperfections made flesh. I love you for who you are. I accept your hedonism with open arms. And, frankly…” He leaned close to Rori’s ear, tickling it with his scorching breaths - soft fingertips amorously caressed his jaw with light, tantalizing strokes – and whispered sensuously, “I find it _very_ attractive.”

For the first time, Rori found himself clutching obstinately at the previous topic, refusing to be diverted by his lover’s attempts to seduce him for even an instant. Never before that he could recall had something mattered so much that it couldn’t wait until after he’d ravished the Englishman. “But doesn’t it hurt you that I’m so… _free_ with sex? Doesn’t it hurt you that I lay with others?” Still clasping the blonde’s balmy hand, he held it desperately to his lips, afraid to hear the answer even as he pressed kisses to Julian’s flesh that were perhaps more for his own comfort. The last thing he wanted was to know that he was hurting his angel and that he wasn’t saying anything. This beloved mortal meant the world to him, and to realize that he’d boorishly been abusing – nay, _raping_ his affections… It would have been the ruin of him.  

The Mad Hatter studied him seriously now, tawny eyes flicking across his features in the safe, secluded darkness of their bedroom, then pulled their joined hands down from his mouth and kissed him. As Julian pulled away, Rori found himself fascinated with the sight of those thick lashes lifting from delicately freckled cheekbones, revealing the intense fawn-brown irises hiding beneath, ready as always to stare straight into his heart and render him as smitten as the evening they’d met. “As long as I can trust you with my love, and know that you love me in return, then I won’t be hurt. Come now,” Julian murmured with an enticing smile, “sleep with me.”

Finally permitting a grateful smirk to come to his mouth, Rori gave in to his most beloved mortal’s whims and allowed himself to be enshrouded in Julian’s heady embrace, falling with him into a familiar velvet abyss.

 _You will never have to worry about my love for you vanishing, my darling – my dearest_ angel _, Julian…_

**-x-**

Jason groaned as he buried his face in his hands, elbows resting heavily on the worn wooden table. Lightning briefly illuminated the kitchen, redundantly showing him once more with a brilliant flash of stainless-steel appliances that remained burned onto the backs of his eyes that it was indeed empty, devoid of lurking vampyric forms. The candle had slowly burnt itself to a stub; hardening wax poured down the holder as though it were a fountain, frozen in time.

“Dammit, Jason. Stupid, stupid, _stupid_.” He irately hissed at himself. “That has got to be the _stupidest_ thing you’ve ever done. Christ. What the hell is _wrong_ with me?!” Even though the incident had taken place at least half an hour ago, there he still sat, in the chair where the vampire had cornered him. He could still feel Rori’s lips, his hands, on his skin like an insubstantial wraith left to mercilessly plague him. Jason could still taste the bitter copper tang of the blood that the vampire had been drinking as they spoke.

It sat in front of him now, clotting over in the glass and looking like the coagulated leftovers from a truly bizarre science project.

He sagged against the table with a sigh. Why was he letting this bother him so much?

 _Oh, right_ , he reminded himself with a sarcastic roll of his eyes. Because it was _Rori_ – _that_ was why.

Why had he stopped? Most of the time the vampire would just keep going, regardless of what Jason said or did, but… No. Tonight he had done it not just once, but _twice_. Hands bracing his forehead, holding his bangs out of his face, Jason continued to stare at the blood-filled wineglass, ignoring the rage of the storm outside the kitchen. He felt a hot blush creep its way up from beneath the neck of his t-shirt, stretching with taunting fingers into his face.

Maybe he stopped because…

No, that was ridiculous. Folding his arms on the table, he tiredly rested his chin on his forearms. Mind, this whole thing was ridiculous. It was ridiculous because Jason had, for some odd, moronic reason decided to talk to _Rori_ of all people about this. _Rori!_ The very vampire who got a ceaseless, illimitable variety of kicks out of sexually harassing him!

The sensation of the immortal’s lips burned on his skin again like a brand, stoking yet hotter the fires of confusion that had begun to roar within him.

Why was he enjoying that but hating it at the same time? Jason wasn’t gay, he knew that. He couldn’t be. He liked women. Hell, he _loved_ women. But still… the question arose in his mind again.

Why had Rori stopped?

Suddenly, Jason’s eyes snapped open as a mortifying thought brought itself to his attention, and his head stiffly jerked up to stare at nothing.

What if Rori…?

_No. No way in hell. He can’t know something even I don’t... Can he?_

Jason firmly shook his head, trying to dismiss the thought as completely as his mentality would allow; then he downed the rest of his cold cocoa in a single long draught and rose to leave.

**-x-**

To Be Continued…

**-x-**

**So, like it? Hate it? Wish it would spontaneously combust? Leave me a review and tell me all about it! C’mon, I wanna know _everything!_ –maniacal cackle-**


	3. Chapter Two

“Empty Crown” © Yas

_August 31_

_  
_Buried comfortably within a warm tangle of pillows and comforter, Jason’s mind was roused just long enough from the dark, secluding embrace of slumber to acknowledge the tiny little ribbons of cold seeping down the back of his neck. He shrugged his blanket higher up over his shoulder with a muffled grumble, nuzzled himself deeper into his pillows, and lay perfectly still for one fraction of an instant before his body began to shift on its own. Groaning quietly under his breath with the effort, sleep-logged limbs dragged themselves along with him like sodden, empty sleeves as he rolled lethargically onto his back, and squirmed onto his side. With another somnolent breath, he sluggishly tipped forward, then felt the world suddenly wink out of existence beneath him...  
  
And landed face-first on his bedroom floor with a loud and blatantly irritated grunt.  
  
Well, if he hadn’t been awake before, he was now, and only one thought managed to untangle itself from the shredded remnants of sleep long enough to become coherent.  
  
 _…Ow.  
  
_ An annoyed groan wriggled out from somewhere within his chest as he yanked an arm out from beneath his torso and allowed it to flop limply onto the floor beside him. Not for any particular reason, of course, save that of stemming the tinglies from building up any more than what they already had in the tips of his fingers, but as far as he was concerned, that was reason enough. He wasn’t especially fond of that feeling – not when it was in his hands. After all, he needed his hands – for more reasons than just stuffing his face, playing video games, and exercising his godly skills on his guitars, too.  
  
The main reason, however, was becoming more and more prevalent all the time, and while that wouldn’t normally warrant a great deal of concern, these weren’t normal times.    
  
 _First thing in the friggin’ morning and already today’s out to get me,_ his mind blearily groused to itself. Another torpid groan escaped from his throat, a feeble attempt at best to rally enough energy to finish waking himself up and peel his face off the hardwood floor. _Shit… Since when did I ever start sleeping so close to the edge, anyways?  
  
_ Sluggishly pushing himself up onto his elbows, he peeked out through the massive snarl of blankets and twisted his head around to peer at the blurry neon green digits of the digital clock piled amongst the other heaps of junk on the bookshelf behind him. Bleary brown and platinum irises quickly became shadowed as leaden, sleep-deprived lids lethargically squinted in the murky gloom of his bedroom.  
  
11:37 AM. Like all true night owls, he made a face at the complacent numbers openly mocking him and dropped lifelessly to the floor.   
  
_Ugh. More sleep, need._ Lots more, as in until five-ish or so, if he could be at least that lucky. He was a growing boy, after all, and last night had been… appallingly _long_ for the whole two hours he’d been actually up and about to stupidly waltz right into Rori’s conniving little clutches. Well, maybe not so little, given the inherently, sensuously large size of the vampire’s hands – with their long, tapered fingers and a smooth, firm palm – but…  
  
The thought process stopped there.  
  
 _What the shit.  
  
_ Yeah. If he was putting that much effort into thinking about that bastard’s _hands_ , he definitely needed more sleep. Rori had nice hands, sure, but that didn’t alter his entire genetic code and replace the extra leg that errant Y chromosome had somehow managed to lose during the process of his gestation.  
  
Not bothering to attempt a relocation onto the bed he’d composed of two floor-bound mattresses, Jason burrowed down into his cocoon where he lay, basking in the soft warmth of his blankets while remaining blissfully unaware of the curious odds and ends cluttered beneath him. Nothing had cracked when he’d fallen, therefore he was clear of all CDs and breakables, therefore all presumptions that he was laying on anything of immediate value went out the window. Curling into a tight ball as he nuzzled his face into his bed sheets, Jason blindly sought out the straggling threads of his interrupted slumber, allowing himself a sigh in the hush while he prepared for his return to sleep. Seconds turned into minutes, and minutes did their damnedest to feel like hours as he lay there on the floor, only to find himself utterly incapable of losing his consciousness to that nice dark bliss for a second time.    
  
With lethargic lids still stiff and heavy with sleep, he cracked open mismatched eyes to share a drowsy glare with the shadowy wall of his green tartan comforter.  
  
“Well,” he grumbled, voice left rocky, slurred and thick with the remnants of slumber. “Ain’t this just fuckin’ peachy.” Uttering a string of nonsensical and only semi-coherent curses longer than the span between the continents in the back of his mind, Jason mobilized under his puddle of blankets and crawled with a roar of a yawn back onto his bed. He flopped down onto his butt and swept aside the upper half of his shapeless cloak, leaving his blankets tangled around his waist with his dog tags resting crooked between his shoulder blades; and there he remained, body slouched, gaze blank, and expression somnolently, if thoroughly, unimpressed with life.  
  
Staring a hole into the wall opposite him, Jason’s empty mind – still dozing amongst the plush grey matter of his brain, no doubt – entertained a notion it seemed to revisit more times than he cared to count. _One o’ these days,_ it lethargically mused, _I think I’m gonna take a casual little road trip, track down whoever invented mornings, and when I find them, I’m gonna shoot them. Then I’m gonna feed ‘em to Arty’s overgrown rat._ Bloodshot eyes gave a sluggish, mismatched blink; he yawned again in a display that would have made a sated lion proud before he resumed his vapid, disgruntled staring at nothing. _Or eat them. I like eating._ A loosely balled fist lifted to rub a knuckle sleepily into his brown eye. _Eating’s good.  
  
_ Drawing in a long breath through his nose, Jason linked his fingers with a stretch, yawning once again as he arched his back and relished the delicious pull of taut muscles as he wrung the lethargy from his system. When he didn’t feel the anticipated tug and tear of his wounds opening, however, he faltered, a minute frown creasing his brow. _Wait a tic…  
  
_ It took a moment of Herculean effort to rouse his brain enough to recall what had happened the night prior in the first place – but then, as though something within him had flipped a switch, he remembered.    
  
 _“The very least I could do after inflicting those horrid wounds is take them away again.” Ageless celadon eyes softened, and the vampire’s head tilted itself ever so slightly as a dark brow furrowed. “How do you feel?”  
  
_ Rori. Rori had healed him. And then he’d backed him into a wall and –  
  
 _a hand slid down, amorously melting around the curve of his buttock, and squeezed. Hard.  
  
_ Jason’s mind slammed the door on those particular aspects of the evening as soon as they reared their heads. Point was, his wounds were gone and that was good enough. Case closed. Probably not for long, but for now it was satisfactory. As far as he was concerned, the rest of the night had never even happened.    
  
 _Welp, may as well get dressed, go get some food…_ He paused, sniffed, slouched over his legs in his blankets as he blearily stared at nothing and heaved a soft sigh; his stomach, in reply, gave a low, petulant growl, earning itself a look of reproachful acknowledgement. _Yeah, yeah… ‘hungry’. Shut up_. And if he tried to snatch something to eat in his current attire – consisting of boxers and nothing more save bare skin – his streak of luck firmly dictated that Rori would be hovering in the nearby vicinity of the kitchen, positively waiting to pounce.  
  
 _Do not wa- Wait.  
  
_ Struck by a sudden thought, he twisted his head to sniff lightly at his armpit and wrinkled his face. Perhaps the smell would fend the vampire off… Or attract him – who really knew with the undead. For all he knew, extensive as his expertise was, maybe they were attracted to scents that reminded them of their own kind. Own kind, of course, being corpses buried six feet in the earth, flesh slowly rotting away with nests of writhing maggots for eyes…    
  
 _On second thought…  
  
_ Being molested first thing in the morning wasn’t really all that appealing, but neither was smelling like a five-month-old cadaver. Well then, onto the first order of business: Shower – unless he wanted to be collectively kicked out of the kitchen on his ass by every roommate within a twenty-foot radius of him, in addition to all those standing downwind. Secondly: Find food.  
  
And thirdly, which could be interchanged with the second if life really decided to spite him so vehemently… Avoid the vampire for as long as humanly possible.  

 

**-x-**

  
Sauntering down the hall with a towel draped about his neck, Jason idly scratched at the back of his head and scrubbed his fingers through the erratic clumps of wet, matted hair. Much, much better. Now that he was all nicely refreshed and squeaky clean to boot, the only thought on his mind was what Julian had made for breakfast – even though, he idly noted with a glance at his watch, it was already noon, which meant the likelihood of any sustenance of a breakfast-like nature was rather slim.  
  
A heavy breath of discontent thrust itself from his chest. As if the day wasn’t starting out bad enough, raining on his proverbial parade with memories of the night before.  
  
Against his will, another jaw-cracking yawn escaped, and he rubbed a knuckle into the moistening corner of his eye. Something crusty greeted him, eliciting a frown as he scraped the offender away with his fingernail. _Bah… Eye boogers._ He sighed, frame slumping slightly as he turned into the kitchen’s swinging door, shouldering it open as he distractedly wiped his knuckle against the leg of his jeans. _Gross.  
  
_ “Ah! Good morning, Jason!”  
  
“Mornin’ Jules.”  
  
“Hey Jace,” a familiar voice impishly chirped, drawling his name out with mischievous delight. “How’s it hangin’?”  
  
Check: the rain had suddenly become a downpour. With hail – and thunder and lightning with the slightest and ever-increasing chance of a tornado, hurricane, or tsunami lingering in the near future.  
  
Freezing in mid-step, Jason could do nothing more than stupidly stare at the young woman whose hand was raised in a teasing wave, fingers waggling as she smiled at him from the scarred wooden table at the other end of Julian’s domain, a masterpiece of a kitchen that would have left chefs and interior designers alike salivating over the assembly of rich woods, slick marble, and modern stainless steel. Mere seconds later, shock was replaced with a smouldering dislike and his hands found themselves fisted stiffly at his sides, head dipping and shoulders hunching; mismatched eyes sent the older girl a spiteful glare. “What in the _frack_ are you doing here?” He growled from between clenched teeth.  
  
The girl pouted, deep brown eyes shining with mock tears from beneath the shadows created by her cap. Tch, of course, leave it up to her to be able to produce tears on cue. “What…?” She whined. “You’re not happy to see me? Even after I went out of my way to come all the way here so soon before school starts up again? I’m so _hurt_!” She pitifully sniffled. “Do you have any idea how much each trip here _costs_ me?!”    
  
“Don’t dodge my question.” He snarled, “What in the bloody, buttfucking _hell_ are you doing here, Morgan?” Okay, so Julian’s English flare was rubbing off on him a tad. So what? Unlike Julian, he was not gay. Not in the least. Julian was flamboyant, a borderline transsexual – in fact, he was pretty sure that Julian was a woman trapped in a man’s body. Jason, on the other hand, was straight as an arrow, a man in a male’s body, and that’s all there was to it.    
  
“Oh, fine. I get it.” Dark – and notably impressively dry - eyes sent him a flat, emotionless stare before she shrugged and went back to contentedly sipping her energy drink as though her previous state of distress had never existed. “You’re not happy to see me. Well, tough cookies, buttercup. You’re just gonna hafta suck it up ‘cause I’m here anyways an’ I ain’t packin’ up an’ _leavin’_ again just ‘cause you feel like bein’ a stuck-up twat.”  
  
“What!?” Jason hoarsely barked in indignation. After all the shit that wench put him through on a daily basis, she had the nerve to call _him_ the stuck-up twat?!  
  
“Now now, children, don’t start bickering. It’s hardly even past noon.” Jason glanced over with a peevish snort and narrow, irate eyes as Julian wandered away from the stove with a steaming cup of tea cradled in his hands. “Which means it’s too early to have to play referee, all right?” After pinning Jason with a firm, reprimanding look – he may as well have tacked his name onto the end in a subdued, matronly warning – the blonde turned a warm grin to Morgan as she blinked at them from the table. “You’ll have to forgive him, dear. You know he’s not much of a morning person.”  
  
“Well, yeah,” she snorted with a sardonic roll of russet eyes. “I mean, I’m no morning person either – an’ let’s face it, I’d hardly call this morning – but that’s still no reason for him ta be rude.”  
  
“Oh really? _I’m_ being the rude one? That’s funny because I could have sworn that you were the one calling people stuck-up twats around here!”  
  
“Aw, muffin…”  
  
“Y’know what, Morgan? Why don’t you just suck,” an emphatic pause, “my,” with a little extra vitriol, “blowtorch.”  
  
“Jason!”  
  
Prickling beneath the blonde’s hissed reprimand and the silent mouthing of an admonishing, “Be _have_ ,” he stuffed his hands in his pockets with a disgruntled snort and clenched his teeth down on the sides of his tongue. He couldn’t trust himself when that wench was around – there was no telling what snide comments would come out of his mouth whenever she opened hers.  
  
Stalking sullenly to the table with his gaze fixed firmly on his seat of choice – which just so happened to be the one furthest from his unpredictable master – he flopped down and propped his heels on the table. After all, duty called, and that meant he had to stay and at least try to make nice whether he felt inclined to or not. It was just one of the many bountiful joys of interacting with the individual holding one’s memories and indeed the very essence of their being hostage.  
  
Not that she was holding his memories and such hostage by choice, or anything – as far as either one of them knew, that was just the way the whole ‘muse/master’ relationship worked – but that had never made Morgan any more of a joy to collaborate with. By nature alone, she always had been, and always would be a pain in the ass. Jason’s ass in particular.  
  
 _"Consider it my way of…”_ _The tip of a slick, wanton tongue emerged to teasingly brush against the flesh just beneath the corner of his jaw, and the vampire’s hand slid down to amorously squeeze one of his buttocks. Hard. “Making amends._ ”  
  
Three seconds later Julian testily cuffed at his ankles: housewife speech for “get your bloody feet off of my table before I forcibly remove them with my meat cleaver.” It was either comply or face mutilation. Jason quite wisely chose to comply.    
  
Clearing his throat after flicking a glance at the once more decidedly cheerful blonde as he shambled along behind him to pull out a seat across from the brunette, Jason tried his very best not to grimace when Morgan continued.  
  
“I mean, is a simple visit every now an’ then really that bad?” She mock-pouted, sulkily poking the tips of her index fingers together.  
  
Christ, he just wanted to smack her sometimes. She went through enough mood swings to make even the most volatile woman going through menopause shudder. Some people attributed it to her having an “artistic personality.” Jason told it like it was and attributed it to Morgan being cracked in the head, with a side-order of a severe and deep-rooted mood/personality disorder.  
  
“Oh of course not, dear! As hard as it may be to believe, some of us _do_ enjoy your visits.” Julian laughed, a bright smile upon his lips, settling his elbows on the table. Linking long, effeminate fingers together in a loose web, the Englishman lightly leaned his cheek on them. “At any rate, how have you been getting along back home? And how come none of your friends came with you this time?”  
  
“Thank god, one’s bad enough,” Jason muttered; when Julian shot him another mild, reproachful scowl, he merely rolled his eyes before settling back in his chair to sulk like a child.  
  
Morgan simply shrugged, remaining ignorant of Jason’s statement even though he knew she’d heard it. He’d made sure she had. “Meh, I dunno. Guess they were busy.”  
  
“Well that’s a shame,” Julian sighed into his tea. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen the girls now.”  
  
“So what does that make me, then, huh? Chopped liver? A _man’s_ chopped liver?” Morgan snorted with a theatrical show of indignation.  
  
“Yes,” Jason lazily mumbled, giving the blonde a wide-eyed look that screamed ‘hey, she asked for it’ when Julian sent him another slanted glare and a silently mouthed demand to stop. Heaving a temperamental sigh, Jason fired a peevish sneer at the brunette when, not for the last time, she continued as though she hadn’t heard him, her face automatically warping into a hurt pout – puppy eyes and all.    
  
“An’ here I was thinkin’ that you were happy to see me, Jules! After everything we’ve been through together! This is… this is almost… cruel!” She loudly sniffled, burying her face in her hands. The very instant she saw the Mad Hatter’s shocked expression through cracked fingers, however, she grinned with a good-natured laugh and fanned a hand sporting an old, chipping coat of black nail polish. Jason, all the while, tried his level best not to express his own sentiments by gagging and possibly hurling projectile vomit at her. After all, it’s not like it was entirely impossible that he would turn just in the right way from the gag-spasm… “I’m just kidding, Jules! Just kidding!” She chuckled, folding her arms as she leaned her elbows on the table.  
  
 _Too bad I’m not,_ Jason’s thoughts sourly mumbled to themselves. _That projectile vomit plan is just starting to look better and better and hey, what can I say? I’m a weak man._  
  
“Oh, Morgan, don’t do that to me,” Julian breathed, dramatically placing a hand over his heart as he sagged back into his chair.  
  
Blinking wide, dark eyes at the Englishman, the brunette simply threw her head back and laughed once more.  
  
Allowing his own sheepish smile to surface, Julian took a dignified sip of hot tea – no doubt some secret attempt to stave off a quickly surfacing blush – before wetting his lips, cocking his head at her, and settling himself once more into conversation. “But as I was saying, dear, how are things back home?”  
  
Slumping back in her chair, Morgan took a deep breath, huffing it out through puffed up cheeks as she ran her hand over her cap, tilting its visor back to reveal more of her ashen face, skin pale and porcelain smooth in sharp contrast with her dark eyes and the equally dark half-circles beneath them. “Well…” She remarked, emotive brows lifting into an arch. “Work’s been a bitch, summer’s been a bitch, my writing’s been a bitch as has the drawing might I add…” A slanting, petulant glare at Jason, which he enthusiastically returned with a side-order of pertly flipping her the bird; Julian resigned himself to merely giving an exasperated roll of his eyes. “Really,” the girl shifted and hung a leg over the arm of her chair with a sigh, “the only thing that’s not been a bitch is… Well, now that I think about it… nothing, really. It kinda blows, to be totally honest with you.”  
  
“Oh, well that’s too bad.”  
  
“Tell me about it. What’s been up with you people?” As though suddenly coming to a brilliant revelation, Morgan perked up against the back of her seat and fixed abruptly bright, clear brown eyes on the blonde. “Oi, anyone still a virgin here?”  
  
Jason choked on his own saliva as the remark finally registered, yanking him violently out of the nearly catatonic state he’d just gotten comfortably settled into as he pinned the girl with a wide-eyed stare. She shot Julian a sly grin, and jerked her thumb down the table at him.  
  
“I’m guessing he’s not?”  
  
“It’s none of your goddamn business whether I’m a virgin or not!” Jason barked upon instinct. Christ Almighty, what had possessed God to create such an insufferable little _harridan_?!  
  
He hadn’t, that had to be it. She had to be some kind of offspring of Satan or something – an unholy fiend set loose upon the earth for the sole purpose of driving him batshit crazy and quite possibly homicidal as an extra added bonus. He stared at her, his mismatched gaze hard enough to bore holes through her head, and envisioned a pair of wicked obsidian horns sprouting up from her skull, cleverly hidden only through the use of a magic spell he’d heard Yue refer to as a “glamour.” The look fit her almost too well. It should have been unnatural for such an appearance to befit someone so indisputably, and yet, the more he thought about it, the more he began to wonder why those horns weren’t actually there. Maybe they only emerged when she was sleeping. Or maybe she ground them down like they did with some of the hellhounds. That had to be it.    
  
“Oh…” She drawled with a knowing grin, “So, Jacey-kins… Was Rori gentle?” She cooed, her grin widening to a large, toothy smile as darkly outlined eyes slyly narrowed.  
  
 _“A cross…?” Wrist caught fast in the redhead’s grip, laughter began bubbling in the vampire’s throat, a smile spreading across white lips in the darkness as those blood-chilling red eyes slid back down to his own, wide and wet with fear. “How adorable.” With scarce more than a glint of silver, the tiny crucifix was gone, torn from paralyzed fingers and flung deep into the inky shadows of his bedroom. “You really shouldn’t believe everything you read, you know.”  
  
_ Oh, that crossed the line. That crossed it and jumped right off the steep fucking cliff on the other side. _Jason… try not to kill her. You don’t really want to rip that smug grin right off her face. You really don’t…_ A pause, as his conscience batted the notion back and forth. _Oh, fuck it all. Yes you do._ With a deadly smirk playing about on his lips, he leaned forward onto his elbows, oblivious for the first time to Julian’s pleading gaze. “Morgan,” he growled sweetly, “unless you’ve been seriously considering having some amateur plastic surgery done lately, I think it’d be in your best interests to keep that oversized nose of yours in your own business before you lose it. We wouldn’t want you to scar now,” he finished with a vicious, feral smile.  
  
The brunette lurched forward in her seat, countenance warping into a goading mask, kohl-lined eyes wide. “Oh yeah? That a threat, Jacey-boy? You don’t scare me,” she scoffed, slapping her hands against her chest before spreading her arms wide in challenge, “Bring it.”  
  
Before he had a chance to leap over the table to strangle the cocky little bitch, Julian was at his back, firmly pressing him back down into his seat. For a flaming swan, he was strong, and even Jason wasn’t arrogant enough to deny that. And _fast_. He didn’t know when Julian had been afforded the time to hurry over to him, but at that particular moment, he was too pissed off to care.  
  
 _It wasn’t natural to have something like that in him. It hurt, and it took everything he had to lock the strangled cry behind the gritted gates of his teeth, crushing his face down into his bedding. He wanted it out of him – someone get it out of him…!  
  
_ “Jason, please calm yourself –"  
  
 _The vampire’s voice was silky smooth against the curve of his ear, warm with satisfaction as Jason’s body, trembling with exhaustion, rendered weak and vulnerable by violation, furled in on itself. A greedy hand smoothed itself down his arm, melting over his ribs, down his hip and thigh, devouring the contours of his form as it slipped over his naked skin. “You have quite the magnificent voice, you know, once you’ve been persuaded to sing. I look forward to your next performance.”  
  
_ Using an arm to slap the Englishman’s hands off of his shoulders, Jason shoved himself to his feet, ignoring the blonde’s shocked little breath as he reflexively backed a step away. “I’m not going to fucking _calm_ myself, Julian!” A virulent smirk reached his lips, dancing malevolently in his eyes, as he aimed an accusing finger at his master. “That little bitch doesn’t even know, does she? Does she know what that bastard did to me? Sorry,” Jason corrected himself with a caustic laugh, “ _keeps_ doing to me?” The humor drained from him like a lanced abscess, grin dropping from his lips. “Or does she just get some sick fucking _kick_ out of rubbing it in?!”    
  
“Jason…” The blonde’s tawny gaze softened, fine brows furrowing in sympathy as he hesitantly reached out for Jason’s shoulder. Upon instinct, Jason jerked himself out of the Englishman’s reach, expression hard.  
  
“Y’know what, Julian, just…” The wrathful grin cruelly twisted at the corners of his lips for only a moment as he wetted them, head shaking as he backed against the edge of the table. “You know what? No. I’m not gonna waste any more of my fucking time on this!” Without bothering to even so much as utter another word, he roughly shouldered his way past the blonde, and completely ignored his master’s pained gaze as he stormed out.  
  


**-x-**

  
Staring in shock after Jason as he vanished out of the kitchen with all of the drama that usually surrounded him, Morgan turned her gaze to the table, eyes flitting blindly about the nicks and scars adorning its surface, before she guiltily peeked up at Julian. He was still watching the door, expression heavy with dismay, his shoulders slumped. The abrupt silence was smothering, broken only by Jason’s caustic, virulent words as they echoed throughout her mind in an unending loop, while shame and anguish wound themselves about her heart in an impenetrable web of razor wire. And with every moment that passed in that deathly hush, a crank ratcheted, and its grip began to tighten.  
  
“Julian…” Morgan faltered, her gaze plummeting, her jaw clenching as she struggled to gather the courage to continue. Christ, what was someone supposed to say after something like that? Why had she been so _stupid?_ Banishing the admonishment from her mind with a tight clench of her eyes, she furled her hands into fists and forced herself to continue. “I’m so sorry, Julian. I… I shouldn’t have said that.”  
  
 _Gee, ya think?_ Her mind mordantly snorted. Wilting under the scorn, she watched her fingers as they idly picked at each other in her lap, head bowed, expression marred with misery. “I really am sorry,” she murmured again, the words abashed and faltering as they struggled to take shape, only to escape in the softest of admissions. “I guess…” Her throat choked the words off, countenance locking up in self-admonishment for a moment as she gave a tiny shake of her head and backpedalled. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize how touchy he still was about that. I kinda thought… Y’know, knowing him…” A slight, helpless shrug lifted leaden shoulders, the barest whisper of an empty laugh escaping her unbidden.   
  
Instead of the sharp reprimand she’d expected, Julian did nothing more than cast a sad, thoughtful glance her way, lightly folding his arms across his abdomen with a soft sigh. “It’s not just going to go away, Morgan. It’s not like a scratch that you put a plaster on and wait a day or two for it to heal.”  
  
Without saying a word, she sagged further down into her chair as she watched her fingers idly fumble with one another, running her nails over the pads of her fingertips or tracing a path along the edges of her chipping black polish. “I know,” she murmured. _God dammit,_ she mutely cursed, head thwacking itself back against the solid wood of her chair as makeup-blackened lids clenched themselves shut. _Stupid, stupid,_ stupid! _Why’d you fucking_ say _that?! You couldn’t have stopped for two fucking seconds to actually_ think _before you…_ She’d only meant to tease him, to poke a little fun at the fact that Rori seemed utterly incapable of keeping his hands to himself in Jason’s presence; or the way the vampire relentlessly flirted with the muse, and the way Jason always got so ruffled in response.  
  
There was no denying that she’d gotten a kind of kick out of seeing Jason – normally so sharp, confident and assertive – turn into a blushing, flustered, stuttering mess. After all, he’d always been irritable but ultimately unflappable with _her_ – responding with sarcasm and mockery with a deftness that had made her want to punch him in the throat something fierce on far more than one occasion – so to see him suddenly on the defense around someone like Rori was more than a touch amusing in her mind, but then…  
  
Then, there was the flipside of their relationship. The aspect she’d naively shrugged off with a laugh, until it had actually happened.    
  
 _"You know this know this is like the humanoid equivalent of abandoning a puppy in the woods, right?”  
  
_ _A soft, dry snort escaped her before she raised her voice above the ferry’s engines and the sound of the ocean splitting into whitecaps against the waterline as the cool breeze kissed at her skin. “I’d hardly call this abandoning a helpless puppy in the woods, Jace.”  
  
_ _Keenly observing the muse from her peripherals, she watched as Jason’s jaw clenched, expression clouding, his mismatched silver and brown eyes staring out at the sea without ever really seeing it. He managed the tiniest of nods, but nothing more.  
  
_ _She mulled over his response for a moment, sensing the tension building inside of him while they sat there in the only kind of silence allowed beneath the engine noise and hiss of water beneath them. When it had been made amply apparent that the muse had nothing more to say – merely brooding at the gunmetal waves in the distance – she bumped him with her shoulder and gently murmured, “Hey, I’m not goin’ anywhere, Jace. You need help, I’m just a phone call away.”  
  
_ “It does seem as though he’s become more sensitive about that lately, though, doesn’t it?”  
  
Heart breaking while that fateful conversation on the ferry replayed itself in her mind – merely serving to highlight her abject failure to be there when Jason had needed her the most - Morgan tore her attention away from the past as Julian’s soft voice broke through the brume, and she turned a despondent glance to the meditative Englishman. “Whatta y’mean?”  
  
The blonde sent nothing more than a cursory glance at her before returning his gaze to the door, attentively remaining locked on the entrance as though Jason might suddenly reappear with barely a moment’s notice for some reason known only to his bizarre, unfathomable psyche. “About Rori and himself. He seems to have become more sensitive about that area of discussion than usual.” He cast a meaningful glance at her again, only the faintest traces of a smile coming to the edges of his lips. “Most of the time he simply shrugs it off or fights back with another one of his sarcastic retorts, but this time…”  
  
 _This time he blew up._ Morgan’s brow quirked as the Mad Hatter trailed off, lost in his thoughts. Raising her voice softly into the silence, she gave the blonde a gentle verbal nudge for elaboration. “Jules, you’re losing me here.”  
  
Julian remained still for a long moment, his gaze locked on the door before a hand lifted to partially cover his smiling mouth. “Oh, it’s nothing for the time being, I suppose. Just another abstract thought of mine.”  
  
Giving a self-deprecating chuckle with a quirked brow, Morgan tapped a finger to her temple before leveling it at the Englishman. “You kidding? I’m like the friggin' queen of abstract thoughts here. Yours can’t be any worse than mine are.”  
  
“I suppose not,” Julian lightly laughed; his voice trailed off once again as he returned his attention to the door, a slight, inherently perturbed furrow growing in his brow.  
  
 _“What if I forget, Morg?” The words were tumbling out of his mouth before he even seemed to realize they were there, and there was a quiver of trepidation that she could hear lingering just beneath the surface of his voice as she regarded him from behind her sunglasses. “What if I just wake up one morning and I can’t remember anything?”  
  
_ _She yielded to the validity of his concerns with a brief tilt of her head, a fleeting arch of her brows. Good thing she’d been expecting this to come up, sooner or later. “That’s why I got these for you.” Reaching into the pocket of her coat, Morgan’s fingers curled around the puddle of metal that had pooled at the bottom, and gathered it into the palm of her hand before she withdrew it again. She nudged the beaded metal chain away from the engraved steel tags underneath and extended it towards him with a subtle quirk of a grin at her lips.  
  
_ _Mismatched eyes scanned the text as he collected the military-style tags from her, his calloused fingers warm against her soft, cool palm. Name, date of birth, blood type… His information. His life. It was all right there, chiselled by a laser into the metal, and she watched, torn between affection and pity, as the emotions began building behind his eyes before the muse visibly choked them back down.  
  
_ _“Just in case.” She leaned into his shoulder, peering down at the tags in his hand and wiggling a finger at them as she pitched her voice into something lighter. “There’s even an, ‘If lost, please return to…’ on the back.” And she merely burst out laughing, cringing away as he indignantly dealt a rough, backhanded cuff to her arm, back to his usual irritable self.  
  
_ _“Bitch.”  
  
_ _“Crybaby.”  
  
_ Morgan waited a long moment in the hush after that, staring down at her fidgeting fingers, words dancing upon her tongue but never escaping until at long last, something managed to escape in a soft, timid voice. “Hey, Jules?”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
She timidly peeked up at the blonde from beneath her lashes, able to meet his eyes for only a moment before they flitted back down to the hands in her lap. “It hasn’t… been getting worse, has it? The whole…” Even though Morgan allowed the sentence to trail away into nothingness, the words still hung in the air, radiating malevolence and ugliness as Julian drew in a long, deep breath, and studiously scrutinized the flooring.  
  
He appeared to roll the words around on his tongue, analyzing each answer in a meticulous search for one that might seem appropriate, his lips parting only for an instant before they would lightly clamp themselves shut again, the muscles in his jaw jumping beneath the smooth flesh of his cheek. And when that answer finally inched hesitantly into the kitchen’s tense atmosphere, those disheartened ochre eyes never lifted to meet her own. “It hasn’t changed,” the blonde wearily murmured, “but neither has it stopped.”  
  
Her heart sank. _Oh, Jace… I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry.  
  
_ “D’you think he meant what he said?” She warily ventured. “About me getting some sort of sick kick out of rubbing in the fact that he was, you know…” Gods, she couldn’t even bring herself to say it. “ _Taken…_ like that?”  
  
Julian sighed again, sending her a gloomy look from over his shoulder. “It’s very hard to say, love. Very hard to say. It might have just been his temper talking – I mean, you two are hardly on amiable terms most of the time – but… To be honest,” He gave a frail shrug, “I’m not at all certain.”  
  
Staring down at her fingers, loosely coiled in her lap, Morgan felt a morose weight settle over her heart. “I’ve never thought of it as a joke, though – I’d never intentionally say something to rub that in his face. I mean… Okay,” She admitted with an agitated quirk of her lips, a lift of her shoulders, “so maybe we do make jokes about him and Rori, but… It’s never been out of malice, or anything. I mean… Fuck. I care about him, Jules,” Morgan protested. “I care about him a lot, and…” Sucking back a loud, unladylike sniffle, and swiping the back of her wrist under her nose as though such a simple gesture could diminish the growing sting, she tried to swallow past the tourniquet that had cinched itself tight around her throat, closing her fingers into tight fists around the tattered hems of the sleeves of her sweater. “I wouldn’t…” She choked down a breath, nostrils flared, chest heaving for air that simply wouldn’t come. “I’d _never…_ ”  
  
 _"Hey, I’m not goin’ anywhere, Jace. You need help, I’m just a phone call away.”_  
  
Idly becoming aware of the tiny, gentle breath the Mad Hatter released into the silence that lingered like an old friend between them, she heard his bare feet gracefully pad across the tile before long, slender arms embraced her, and a warm cheek rested itself on the crown of her head as her countenance crumbled. Julian’s fragrant smell enveloped her as he gently pulled her back into his chest, cradling her temple against his collar bone while tears flooded her eyes. 

_"Just in case.”  
  
_ “I know, love.” The words were little more than a breath, a warm hand gently stroking her hair as she clenched her eyes shut, clutched at his arm, pressed her face into him, and struggled not to cry. “I know…”  
  


**-x-**

  
Jason growled as he slammed his bare fist into the punching bag. The pain that shot through his knuckles with each connection was something he consciously strove to ignore, and yet, on some deeper level he found himself relishing it. Up until now, he never would have believed anyone who told him that pain was cleansing, but as it would turn out, they may have been onto something after all. Each little shiver that raced through his bones, skittering across the surface of his skin, released some of the tension, some of the anger that had bound his chest in white-hot steel.    
  
“ _Mein Gott…_ You know, if I’d known in advance you were gonna let crazy Herr Hulk-man loose in my bedroom, I would’ve thought twice about letting you in.” Lazily resting her chin upon the arms she’d folded over the back of her chair, the German observed each fervent punch he threw at the bag hanging from her ceiling with wide and ever-so slightly perturbed yellow eyes, her mouth pursed into a tight, wary line. “Hulk smash… and Jude no likey smashy.”  
  
Jaw clenched to the point of aching, Jason landed one final punch on the swinging bag, and then stood panting while he stilled it, shooting a powerful glare at the door that led to the hall – and ultimately, down the stairs and through the corridors, to the kitchen. Shaking his head in disgust, he wiped beads of sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. _Bitch._  
  
“ _Hier._ ” Artemis chucked a towel at him.  
  
Snatching the cloth out of the air, Jason buried his face in the bleach-spotted fabric – one sure way of telling that Artemis had done her own laundry for once, or had recently touched up her hair – before wiping away the moisture creating a sheen on his caramel skin. Slinging the towel around his neck, he eyed his audience of one, quietly watching on from nearby. “So,” he said, trying to catch his breath. “How come you’re not visiting? ’S not very often we see her now, y’know. Figured you might wanna-”  
  
“Nah,” Artemis interrupted, darkly shadowed lids drifting shut as she carelessly fanned a hand clad in a fingerless glove at him and swivelled her chair from side to side. “Do not care,” she dismissively drawled. “She cannot recognize the genius beneath all of the crazy, therefore she is not pertinent to my interests.”  
  
Jason made a small sound of acknowledgment in his throat. _Maybe not, but she wouldn’t be the only one. That’s a shitload of crazy to dig through._  
  
Artemis lazily cracked open a brilliant amber eye to inquisitively peer at him. “So what’s your excuse for not visiting and having a jolly good time?” She drily inquired, adding an extraordinarily bad impression of an English accent onto the end of the query just for good measure. Although Jason had to admit, it was a fairly impressive effort since Artemis’s natural German accent was still patently noticeable and had a stiff iron grip on the majority of her speech, regardless of its fluency.  
  
When Jason failed to respond, however, she slid the other eye open to peer at him, sly as a fox with a clever smirk on her pierced lips. Jason, meanwhile, occupied himself with staring at his raw knuckles when the ache from his exertions finally began to sink in; and, naturally, he couldn’t help but gently rub his thumb over the red abrasions in spite of the sting it caused.  
  
“She bring up Rori again and his… _Scheiße_ , what’s the word…” The German glanced aside as she mentally rifled through her vocabulary, prompting the words along with repeated snaps of her fingers. “‘Hypersexual’ tendencies?”  
  
Jason pointedly glared at her out of the corner of his eyes, chafing his raw knuckles a little bit harder and only absently noticing the shiver of pain the action sent rippling through his system.  
  
“So I was right, then.” Snickering to herself over her victory, she tucked a ragged chunk of cheek-length magenta hair behind an ear lined from top to bottom with rings, punctuated by tunnels stretching her lobes, and swiped the pad of her thumb along the underside of her nose, jarring the small steel hoop in her left nostril. He’d never understood the logic – or appeal, for that matter – of having both of one’s nostrils pierced, and then wearing a hoop in one with a stud in the other, but then again, that was Artemis. To claim that there was very little about the German that allowed itself to be governed by the constraints of logic was an understatement of epic proportions. “So what were the newest jokes and giggles about this time eh, _Herr Leichenficker_?”  
  
He scowled and continued to busy himself with inspecting his raw knuckles. “There were no jokes and there were no giggles, now drop it.” Well, at least not on his part, and who the hell cared what antics Morgan devised to embarrass herself?  
  
“Aww, c’mon! You can tell ickle Arty-kins. Why no telling ickle Arty-kins?” The German pinned him with a sulk, her mouth curving perfectly into a soft, upside-down u as those big yellow eyes stared out from their dark circles at him. “No tell makes ickle Arty-kins sadface.”  
  
Platinum and earthy brown eyes flashed another irritated glance at the girl. “I’m not _telling_ because I don’t wanna talk about it.” Realizing full and well the direction their conversation was about to take, Jason stalked out of her cavernous room into the hallway, quietly growling to himself when she thrust herself up from her chair and darted over the mess littering her floor to follow.    
  
“Why not?”  
  
“Because there’s nothing to talk about.”  
  
The German made a rude and unladylike sound behind him. “There’s _always_ something to talk about – _especially_ where you and Rori are concerned.”  
  
“Artemis,” Jason growled dangerously, his voice amply conveying the warning that should she have any desire whatsoever to keep her multiple facial piercings intact, she would drop it.  
  
“Aw come on, I don’t know what the big deal is. I just wanna know what’s going on. That’s all, I swear!”  
  
“It doesn’t really matter whether you swear on it or not. I start telling you something, you always want to know more. I give you an inch,” he elaborated in a deceptively light tone with a thoroughly vexed grin to match as he marched through the corridor, “you take a mile.”  
  
“That’s just because I get curious…!” She protested with a pout. “And really, you can’t blame me, can you?”  
  
Christ, it was almost sickening, knowing how earnestly she believed that there wasn’t a single flaw to be found in her end of the argument. Bugging someone’s bedroom for video and audio, stalking them, tapping their cell, rooting through their email and laundry, doing recon through his social network, and then hacking the rest of the files on his computer was not exactly Jason’s idea of a healthy method for expressing a _mild_ curiosity.  
  
And then, on top of all that, she’d started criticizing his choice of porn over breakfast. In front of _everyone,_ while he’d been choking and gagging and trying, in vain, to explain that the tentacle porn was a prank one of his friends had pulled. He’d been under the impression that Randy had sent him a link to something both extraordinary and insane that his friend had insisted Jason’s more creative side might appreciate. He’d been dead wrong. The fact that natural intrigue and some sense of grotesque fascination had taken over from there was something he’d neglected to mention on purpose during the ensuing argument with his housemates. After all, things had been bad enough as they already were, and contrary to popular belief, he knew full and well when the best possible option was to simply keep his mouth shut.  
  
“Yes, I can, and I _do_ , as a matter of fact.” Jason stuffed his fisted hands in his pockets as he slunk down the first flight of the imperial staircase in the grand foyer, the magenta-haired thief following alongside him; now that he thought about it, she resembled an errant handkerchief, blowing along the sidewalk in a breezy park. It was starting to rather viciously annoy him.  
  
“Well, wouldn’t you be curious too?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Pants on fire,” the German sang, bouncing down the curving stairway behind him. “You would too be curious.”  
  
He cut her off before she could mention the tentacle porn involving nonhuman hermaphrodites again. “No, Artemis, I really, really wouldn’t.” For once, Jason wished his room were just a little bit closer to the stairs. He wanted to be in there, in his private, messy sanctuary that had been smelling faintly of pizza lately and away from _her_.  
  
“Okay, fine. Whatever. Whether you’d be curious or not, I _am_ curious and I really want to know what’s going on around here!”  
  
“And you know your curiosity is more than likely going to kill you one of these days, right?” Good god, did the harassment never end?!  
  
Committing nothing less than his all, he fought down the desire to strangle his meddlesome German housemate, mentally chanting that it was overflow from _her_ , being the snot-nosed little harpy probably still smugly lounging about in the kitchen. God, the sheer thought of her was enough to make him grind his teeth. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d wanted, more than anything, to reach out for the first thing available and throttle the ever-loving shit out of it.    
  
“Probably, but until then I’ll be as curious as I damn well want to be. Jason –” Artemis could do little more than blink, jerking back from the mahogany wood of the door when he slammed it in her face.  
  
Leaning against the wall in disbelief, Jason tilted his head back and buried his face in his hands with a throaty sound of exasperated incredulity, listening only distractedly to the thief cursing him in German outside of his door.  
  
“You _suck_ ,” she hissed in English, just to make her point known. “You suck like industrial strength vacuum cleaner.” Finally, with a hefty, exaggerated sigh, Artemis relented, and – no doubt with one last ill-tempered and pouting huff of frustration – silently retreated. Either that, or she’d immediately dropped to the floor to try and peek through the virtually non-existent crack beneath his door. It sounded ridiculous, senseless, and ludicrous, but he wouldn’t have put it past her.  
  
The German was almost as bad as Rori, in that respect. When she wanted something, her meddling and manipulating wouldn’t stop until she got it; but _unlike_ Rori… Artemis was (mostly) harmless. Despite her absolute lack of consideration when it came to privacy and personal space, she was utterly incapable of taking it upon herself to inflict such great harm upon another human being. Such malevolence simply wasn’t in her nature, and as far as Jason could tell, it never had been. But Rori…  
  
 _“My, you_ are _a delicious little morsel of a boy, aren’t you? And_ feisty, _as well, lucky me.”  
  
_ Allowing himself to sink slowly to the floor, he heaved a groan forth into the silence of his bedroom. Jason dragged the towel away from his shoulders and carelessly lobbed it aside as his hand slid back through his still-damp hair to clutch at the nape of his neck. “Why the hell does everyone always have to get on my case about him?” Long, denim-clad legs slowly tensed, withdrawing themselves into his body as he hunched over bony knees exposed by the well-worn tears in his jeans. Calloused hands clenched around the back of his neck, and his voice dipped into a low, breathy growl as he pressed his forehead to his knees. “I’m fucking _straight_ , dammit… There’s nothing to fucking tell.”  
  
Lids flashing shut, a furrow grew in his brow as he gave a frustrated groan, nuzzling further into the dark crevice between his legs and his body as though in a search for refuge; his arms were braced on the ridges of his knees and folded over top of his head like a protective, isolating mantle. He couldn’t understand why the rest of his housemates were so fascinated by the concept of whatever was happening between himself and the vampire. He couldn’t understand for the life of him what it was that he had written all over his face that never failed to bring the conversation back to the man who simply couldn’t keep his hands – or his dick, for that matter – to himself.   
  
 _I don’t even know why I’m still so sensitive about it – I mean, it comes in such random bursts, I…_ Wilting, Jason sighed, letting the tension drain from his body as eyes bruised by sleep-deprivation cracked open within the shadows to stare at nothing. _I just don’t know how to react anymore. He did… take me, when I wasn’t willing, but… it’s never really seemed like rape. There’ve only been a couple times when he’s ever been even remotely violent. Never actually abusive, just…_ He struggled to ignore the unwelcome libidinous tug in places better left unacknowledged, swallowing down against the sudden aridity in his throat and the anxious flutter of his heart as the memory of hungry hands and a hungrier mouth slipped fluidly through his mind. _Rough, I guess. And…_ The tips of his fingers absently dipped beneath the collar of his shirt, lightly stroking the subtle swell of bone at the base of his neck’s posterior as he recalled the evening prior. _He’s always taken away the injuries he’s caused.  
  
_ _“The very least I could do…”  
  
_ _A gasp ripped itself from his throat – his head bobbing away somewhere far above them, fingers transforming into twitching claws against the vampire’s muscular chest and stomach – as the redhead’s engorged length slid back inside of him until he’d sheathed himself to its root in Jason’s body. Hips began rolling beneath him, slow at first before gaining speed, lighting his nerves on fire with every millimeter of movement, sending pulsing waves of pleasure through his twitching and shamefully reactive sex, aching and begging for a touch, for even the briefest of grazes to satisfy its hunger._  
  
 _Strong hands clutched at his own hips, guiding him back and forth, up and down in tandem with the vampire’s maddening pace, and he was consumed whole by the conflagration, nothing but a searing white void left in his mind while the entirety of his being wanted to scratch and writhe from a complete sensory overload. Every devouring touch, every pornographic sound, every breath that burst hot and moist against his collarbone when the vampire shoved himself upright, clutching Jason to his chest as his thrusting intensified, cinching Jason’s muscles tighter, tighter, entire body clenching around him until he thought he’d scream from the intensity of it all, shattering into a million pieces…  
  
_ As his mind dauntingly waved their last sexual encounter about in his face, Jason tightly curled in on himself and struggled to ignore the heat that blew to life within his gut and groin. He tried to overlook the way part of him – up until Rori’s nails had buried themselves in his back – had shivered under the memory of Rori’s hands, the touch of his lips, and the unspeakable torture he had put Jason through. But that torture was never what it could have been, and it _might_ have been with anyone else – all angry, disparaging diatribes, vengeful knuckles and bruising violence.  
  
It was the way the vampire had made him ache with intense, wholly manufactured desire when Jason had wanted more than anything to resist; the way that wanton, intrusive, unrelenting presence inside of him had ardently driven him deeper and deeper into the embrace of purely libidinous, carnal euphoria. It had been torture until Rori had allowed him that final, rapturous moment of desperate release, the vampire’s face nuzzled into the crook of Jason’s shoulder and neck as he arched and convulsed beneath the weight of a long hard body, a long-fingered hand pumping and milking his sex, while something ripped itself violently, deliciously, from within him by the Englishman’s doing. And more than any other, that was the memory that made his toes curl with the remembering.  
  
That had been Rori’s gift to him for Jason’s eighteenth birthday.  
  
 _Can you really blame them for asking?_ His mind interrupted, recklessly thrusting the prurient trip down memory lane back into the pits of oblivion where it belonged. _I mean, fuck, I have enough questions about it myself. Shouldn’t be any surprise that they wonder, too._  
  
Artemis’s words echoed throughout his thoughts. _“You would too be curious.”_  
  
As Jason’s mind defiantly pulled Rori’s smirking face back into the spotlight of his attention, he quietly whined under his breath again. _But why does it have to be so difficult? Why can’t it just be a simple yes or no answer instead of all these maybes? I just want to figure it out and be done with it!_  
  
Just like the night before, Jason couldn’t help but wonder if Rori knew more than he let on, if perhaps the vampire _knew_ something about how Jason had been feeling lately. He had been acting pretty bizarre, after all, so maybe…  
  
There they were again. The Maybes. Tensing, growling dangerously under his breath, Jason struggled to put the thought out of his mind.  
  
Pushing himself to his feet, pointedly ignoring the heat pooling in places best left unmentioned, he wandered to the wall where three of his five beautiful guitars – an electric-acoustic, bass, and seven-string electric – hung waiting. Even though he’d somehow managed to banish his suspicions, thoughts of what had taken place in the kitchen the night before – the very place where he had sat moments prior with Julian and Morgan, trading “pleasantries” – plagued him unbidden. The feel of the cool hands that had skimmed over his flesh, the shivers that had erupted at every touch; the vampire’s lips, so skilled and sensual, gentle and yet absolutely burning with passion at the same time… And of course, that same goddamn ear-blush just _had_ to accompany the memory that left him wondering whether the pleasure he’d felt had been of the vampire’s creation, or his own.  
  
Sighing again, Jason shook his head, his hand resting placidly against the polished surface of his blood-red Ibanez. Heavy lids tugged themselves open for mismatched irises to gaze at it, and he shook his head yet again in mute refusal as his eyes clenched shut for a second time. Christ, he couldn’t even look at it. The very color reminded him of Rori – which of course led in turn back to the evening prior. Which then led back to the decidedly scandalous, erection-inducing night of his birthday, and the vampire’s… “present.”    
  
Fingers sliding away from the smooth surface, Jason simply stood there, staring out one of his windows with his mind at an utter loss. He couldn’t try to go back to sleep, knowing the salacious, nonsensical dreams that would plague him. He couldn’t venture through the rest of the house to hang out with anyone, because he knew the questions they’d ask, or what they’d lead to. Besides, Rori was more than likely out there by now, and that was, without a doubt in the entirety of his sane mind, the absolute _last_ thing he needed to deal with right now.  
  
 _Ah,_ an insidious voice mused in his ear, _but what about what you_ want?  
  
 _Want, need… Same fucking thing right now.  
  
Really? Are you quite sure? Because I think that what you want differs immensely from what_ you _think you want, and thus conversely what you are starting to_ need _because you’ve become accustomed to_ wanting _it in the first place.  
  
What?_ He growled at his own cryptic, betraying thoughts, squeezing his eyes shut as he pressed the heels of his palms against his temples. _Oh, fuck that. I… am… straight!_ And just for emphasis, just to make sure that conniving little voice in the back of his head understood his point perfectly, Jason gave a frustrated thump against his temples for each word in his last statement.    
  
Running his tongue over his teeth and forcing his muscles to relax, he stared at his window for only a moment longer in consideration before he tossed his contemplations to the wind, and marched across his bedroom. Grabbing his hooded flannel/canvas jacket from the back of his computer chair, Jason fluidly slid it on over his t-shirt and plucked up a rogue pair of sneakers from their haphazard hiding spot beneath his desk. With the dexterity of familiarity, he batted aside the drapes and unlatched the window, lifting it and crawling up, over his cluttered desk, onto the sill. Muscles bunched beneath him as he settled himself on the frame, and Jason took a deep breath as he looked down.  
  
Even though his room was on the ground floor, technically speaking, that didn’t mean he was especially close to the ground itself. That would have made things too easy. The Manor had been built on a hill that dipped down on the eastern side of the house – _his_ side of the house. Meaning there was a whole other floor below him – with high ceilings, in keeping with the rest of the Manor’s design – and nearby was the door to the cellar that Rori had converted into a functional basement.  
  
And as much as he hated to admit it, he shared in Morgan’s fear of heights. The only saving grace in that was the fact that while she positively refused a six-foot drop from a rock in a tunnel, instead vying to carefully climb down with muscles on the ground ready to catch her if she slipped, Jason’s phobia was a bit more… lenient.  
  
Licking his lips, he inhaled a deep breath as he always did, allowing it to trickle leisurely out through the tiny crack in his lips as he restlessly adjusted his weight. He was more than accustomed to escaping out through this window, but even so, he wasn’t pig-headed enough to deny the fact that the jump was only the slightest bit intimidating. Mostly it was the thought that someone could suddenly open the basement door just in time for him to land on it and snap his spine and/or neck, along with a few other choice bones while he was at it. Maybe crack his skull open, completely disfigure his face… After a collision like that, though, he was sure that it would all end the same way: lying on the ground like a twisted rag doll with broken teeth and straying eyes, bleeding to death.  
  
With the added possibility of his brains leaking out through a hole in his skull.  
  
 _You’re doing it again, fuckwit. Knock it off._    
  
Hesitating only a second longer to feebly attempt to banish the grotesque mental image from his mind, Jason clenched his eyes shut and shoved himself away from the windowsill. _Don’t open the door don’t open the door don’t open the door…_ In the blink of an eye, his body stretched only to fold in on itself upon impact with the ground, pitching him forward onto his hands and knees as he lost his balance; within moments, however, pausing only for a tiny breath of relief, he was up and running across the vampire’s expansive estate grounds towards the encompassing forest before he really gave his destination more than a cursory consideration.  
  
Perhaps the fresh air would do him some good. Fresh air, space, and solitude – ah, blessed solitude, eluding him like the Holy Grail. But then again, it wasn’t Rori’s fault that the tenants of the Manor were nosier than a herd of elephants assaulting a bag of peanuts.  
  
It was, however, _entirely_ his fault for encouraging it, the cheap, mind-reading bastard.    

**-x-**

  
An intrigued purr resonated from Rori’s throat as he watched Jason leap down from his window, pitching forward into the grass before reclaiming his balance and sprinting away – with the posture of a proper athlete, no less – in the direction of the trees. So, he was running off again. Well, no worries. He knew the muse would come back. It made him wonder all the same, though. He was accustomed to seeing Jason escape in the dead of night to run off to a bush party or something of the sorts, with his friends parked outside the gate waiting to collect him. It was his favourite means for escape whenever he wanted to leave the Manor without drawing attention to himself. Even so, never before had he seen the teenager execute the tactic during broad daylight. After all, as the muse himself had claimed on more than one occasion, he was simply “ten different kinds of Too Damn Lazy” to be bothered with taking those extra precautions.      
  
Raising a brow in interest, Rori reflexively reached back to stroke the horse’s supple velvet nose as the stallion butted it yet again against his shoulder in a blatant demand for attention. Turning with a soft chuckle, Rori rested his head with a sedate smile against the raven Friesian’s muzzle, humming quietly beneath his breath as he continued to pet the beast’s nose. His horses were wonderful pets; short-lived as they were in comparison to himself, it was still a profound challenge to avoid becoming attached to them. It was, all in all, a little bit of home, a tiny part of his own time that had persisted through the centuries to exist in the present, and so, he found himself clinging to it.  
  
Perhaps he would pay his darling Jason a visit. It wouldn’t prove to be a terribly difficult task to track him, either, what with the mental fix Rori had on every person in residence at the Manor. That was simply a matter of security protocol, though. One could never tell when something unpredictable might attempt to threaten them in some fashion. After all, one was bound to gain enemies over the centuries, and it was a risk that was just as easily impossible to avoid when the vast majority of one’s clientele tended towards other similar and rather notably _criminal_ organizations.    
  
Even so, even if Rori were utterly without the silken telepathic filament that would ultimately lead him to Jason’s location, his darling muse had such a unique scent that always clung to him. Ah, yes, pheromones. That’s what they called them these days. Jason had such a delicious concoction of pheromones… All he had but to do was follow the trail, and for whatever reason, it was stronger just now than was normal – a devilishly titillating curiosity in itself.  
  
It smelled like lust, and that drew his attention with the same efficacy as blood-filled waters did to sharks.     
  
“Oi! Magnificent Mr. Fang! _Asshole_!”  
  
Glancing wistfully once more into the woods where Jason had fled – and shortly thereafter his loyal hellhound Lazzaro had followed in a cheerful bound, tail gaily lashing about like a whip behind him as he vanished into the ferns – Rori turned his attention to the dark-skinned girl jogging up to him, the long, loose curtain of her hair billowing behind her like an obsidian banner. “Yes, darling?”  
  
Holding up but a single finger, the half-Cree girl bent over with her hands on her knees as she attempted to catch her breath. Hard grey-blue irises stared up at him after a moment from beneath dark, furrowed brows, her forehead moist with a sheen of sweat. “One,” she panted, “don’t go running off with one of my horses without telling me. Two,” she raised a second finger, and swallowed back her breaths. “Tell me which one you’re taking so I don’t have to freak out and panic thinking someone stole one of them or something. And three,” She paused, swallowing again as she straightened and fixed him with a seething glare. “Don’t make me run all over the goddamn property looking for you, you fruit basket!” She yelled, gesturing emphatically with her dirty hands and sharply prodding him in the shoulder. “D’you have any idea how unbelievably goddamn _hung-over_ I am right now!?”  
  
The stallion nickered, tossing his head over Rori’s shoulder in response to her rather loud and scathing reprimand, and he resumed his calming petting. Cocking his head, he smiled reassuringly at the panting girl as she sagged once more over her knees, cursing and muttering under her wheezing breaths. “Terribly sorry, darling. I didn’t think you’d be quite so quick to go to pieces over my borrowing of my own horse.” He gave a lethargic shrug of one shoulder beneath the breezy black blazer he’d donned for the ride. “I don’t know how you would’ve thought that someone stole him, either. After all, we have quite the security system,” Rori reminded her with a complacent grin, implying the hellhounds that were stalking the property. It was, after all, common knowledge that only those the hounds recognized would get a foot past the walls encompassing the perimeter of the Manor and the smaller buildings on the property.  
  
She glared at him anyways, as though his stating of the obvious had been a personal affront or some such nefarious, arrogant thing. Seeing as she was somewhat ashen as well as quite obviously suffering from the repercussions of a long night of inebriation, however, he decided to pay her rather unusual vehemence little mind.   
  
“At any rate, you now know that I’m taking Diablo out for a ride, and that he isn’t being flayed alive by a deranged lunatic desperate for fresh meat or a rather mutilated, if well-hung, four-legged sexual partner.” He faltered only for an instant to savour the slow, dramatic grimace of revulsion and disbelief that began to surface on Kali’s paling countenance before sweeping casually onwards. “Well, it was delightful chatting with you, my dear, but I must be off. As they say nowadays… don’t wait up.” With a languid, glassy green wink thrown flippantly in her direction, Rori swung easily and effortlessly up into the saddle. He took but a moment to gather the reins with the deft touch of an expert horseman, and then squeezed his heels gently into the stallion’s ribs, moving the reins slightly along the thick crest as he did so. The equine response was instantaneous.  
  
“Hey! Rori, come back here, you manwhore! I wasn’t done talking to you yet!” Kali yelled after him as the stallion broke into a canter and shot away across the lawn. “I was gonna _re-shoe_ him today, dammit!” Yielding and sodden from the torrent of rain the night before, the turf ripped loose in chunks beneath the stallion’s eager gait, flying high into the air.  
  
And of course, one of them smacked the groom squarely in the shoulder, leaving a dark smudge of mud on her plaid shirt. It automatically earned itself a scathing grey-blue glare of indignation, and rewarded Rori with a tiny grin plucking at the corner of his lips.    
  
Now all that was left was to find his darling muse.

 

**-x-**

  
Absently trailing his touch along the feathered edge of a fern, moisture from last night’s storm collecting on his fingertips as he moved through the undergrowth, Jason’s absentminded voice joined the faint, ambient birdsong in the forest whilst the underlying melody wound itself through his thoughts.  
  
“There’s a war inside my head,  
And I’m drowning in regret…”  
  
The words were faint, sung under his breath with less than half his mind paying them any notice at all. They’d been swelling inside of him, serving as a subconscious reflection of the pensive mood that had settled over him while he’d wandered through the woods, allowing his feet to take him wherever they pleased with no direction from his greater awareness. Singing had always been a kind of self-soothing behaviour for him, one he’d never really questioned or subjected to an undue amount of scrutiny. He was a muse, after all. Perhaps it was simply part and parcel of his genetics – albeit, granted, one that earned him the occasional swat from his housemates if he started bursting into song mid-conversation.     
  
“When the lights come down  
Got an empty crown…”  
  
He picked his way down a decline, taking the slope at an angle and minding the soft, shifting loam underfoot, employing trunks and convenient branches as handholds until he reached the bottom. Laz, on the other hand, barrelled down the slope like an avalanche, merrily bounding like a deer around any obstacles in his way; he whipped around not far away, mouth agape in a happy, panting smile as he seemed to look to Jason for approval, and a chuckle escaped him unbidden. Approval earned, the adolescent hellhound trotted happily into the undergrowth.     
  
“My body’s missing pieces,” he dusted earthen debris from his hands, gaze idly roving the woods – with its lush greenery, ancient trees, and sunbeams filtering through the canopy – in silent wonder of its beauty. “Can’t pull it all together. My body’s missing pieces,” mismatched eyes landed on a fallen redcedar – suspended at an angle over the forest floor – and Jason wandered towards it with music escaping his lips in a sigh. “I wish I could remember…”     
  
Jason hummed a continuation of the song in the relative hush of the lush green forest as he approached the young redcedar that had fallen victim to the angry elements of last night’s storm. He trailed a palm over its bark, walking along its length and curiously inspecting the jagged break that hadn’t quite managed to make it all the way through the trunk before the giant toppled. Fingering a splinter of wood, still damp from the evening prior, he heaved a tranquil breath into the atmosphere and pivoted, leaning back with his elbows on the trunk while he took a moment to drink in his surroundings.  
  
Maybe this end of the coast did tend to run a bit too much on the warm side for his liking, but there was no denying that it resulted in some stunning landscapes. From the rocky shores to the vibrant temperate coastal rainforests with giant, ancient trees robed in moss and a thriving undergrowth full of shrubs and ferns, it had a hell of a lot more scenery that appealed to him than the cultivated prairies of Morgan’s home. There was something mystical about it all, regardless of the fact that most of the trees were soaring conifers, and some small, childish part of him wouldn’t have been at all surprised to stumble across a fairy circle or three during his rambles.  
  
Or, as silly as the mere notion of the thought made him feel, spot a fleeting, gleaming white flicker of a unicorn through the greenery, drinking at a small, crystal clear stream.  
  
Either way, he could feel the age of the place in his bones, but unlike the Manor, it put him at ease in a way that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. It felt like, for lack of a better word… home. Not just in the sense of being the place where he lived, but the place where he, down to the very marrow in his bones, _belonged.  
  
_ Casting his gaze upwards upon a silent whim, he saw that, above the canopy of surrounding trees, the sky was devoid of even the smallest of clouds, nothing but an unending dome of azure stretching on into infinity. It was kind of amazing, to him, at least, that it could be so clear out after the nature of the storm that had beat itself relentlessly against the impenetrable walls of the Manor the day prior. He could still smell the hint of rain that clung to the plants, soil, and trees around him. Something about that scent had always calmed him – the peaceful, refreshing aroma of the earth washed clean. It had a certain… purifying quality to it. He supposed it was one of those things that made a person think that, no matter what happened, there would always be a time when everything would be washed clean.  
  
Since as far back as he could remember, those kinds of analogies had offered a particular sense of comfort to him.  
  
Mismatched eyes drifted down from the canopy to the spongy, life-giving earth at his feet. _I wonder if maybe my past is something like that._ After all, he didn’t know a thing about his personal history, unable to recall even a single memory from before the day he’d met Morgan in the hospital. Maybe he’d done something horrible, something unthinkable, and then some higher entity had wiped his slate clean and gave him a chance to try again.  
  
Then again, if he hadn’t done anything that would merit such an action, he’d lost years of his life, precious memories that he might never get back. It was the cruel blessing that went hand in hand with being born a muse – or so Morgan had always told him, anyways. The bad went out the window, but so did the good.    
  
 _Christ… talk about depressing. Maybe it’s better that I don’t remember what happened._ Recalling the ghastly scars on his wrists against his will – the only phantoms hinting at a past unknown – Jason more firmly abolished the grim train of thought as he idly rubbed at the outline of his dog tags beneath his shirt. Staring absently down at the moist earth he found himself scuffing at with the dirty toes of his beaten sneakers, he shook his head and straightened, boosting himself up onto the fallen trunk to pace back and forth along its dying length.  
  
Stuffing his hands into his pockets, he decided that he might as well try to puzzle out his currently most prominent dilemma – despite the fact that the reason he’d come out here in the first place was to get _away_ from it for a while. But running away had never solved anything. Never would. He knew that. Better to face it and get it over with, rather than allowing himself to be chased around like one of those ugly little Chihuahuas with its tail between its legs.  
  
Nasty little things. Looked like a rat from Chernobyl and happened to be more annoying than a defunct goddamn record player. Or Paris Hilton. Then again, ugly-ass little dogs and ugly-ass Daddy’s girls straight from plastic-factory hell went hand in hand perfectly, so it all worked out.  
  
Nonetheless, as the base thought took root, it gradually transformed into something a whole world less ugly than a Chihuahua, a little less innocuous than the recording that had skyrocketed the heiress into celebrity, and had everything to do with a leash, a collar, and a patent leather g-string with a little doggy tail fastened on the back. And of course, what would that mental image be without its accompanying libidinous red-haired vampire?  
  
 _With but a slip of his thumb, the vibration intensified, eliciting a convulsive full-body shudder and a whimper he locked behind his teeth as the vampire smiled down at him beatifically, watching him tremble, bound and collared on his knees, his forearms lashed together, crossed, behind his back. “Now,” he purred, chin cradled in his fingers, his other thumb stroking a path over Jason’s quivering lips. “All you have but to do is ask nicely, and I’ll give you what you crave.” Ever, ever so gently, the Englishman trailed the top of his foot, as smooth and perfect as the rest of him, along the underside of Jason’s erection, aching and weeping and throbbing with the climax the vampire had repeatedly denied him. “Is that what you want, my love? Do you want to come?”  
  
_ _Christ, his entire body was shaking, a feverish heat searing under his skin, staring up with pleading, watering eyes at the Englishman’s firelit countenance. “P-plea-” The vibration increased to an intense, maddening buzz inside of him, reducing his voice to a guttural keen as his entire body seemed to cinch itself tight, furling into a hunch, hands flexing in and out of claws.  
  
_ _Rori’s grip tightened around his chin, smiling lips drifting just a breath away from Jason’s own from beyond his clenched lids. “Say please,” he whispered, a single fingertip tracing itself, torturously slow, along his sex to its head, where it began gently massaging the opening to his urethra, wrenching a gasp from Jason’s lungs.  
  
_ _“P-please!”  
  
_ _He’d never forget the way the vampire smiled at him then, sinfully smug as those pale celadon narrowed to slits. “Good boy…”  
  
_ The somewhat saner portion of his mind recoiled from that particular recollection like it had burned him. _Agh, fucking hell. No. No, no, no. Just… No!  
  
_ That didn’t stop the image from pursuing him, however, chasing after his consciousness like a heat-seeking missile. “Ugh, dammit, Artemis… As soon as I get back there,” he yelled in the general direction of the Manor, long since blocked from sight by the embrace of the forest, “I swear to god I’m going to wring that pervy little _neck_ of yours! You’re turning me into a total fucking pervert – and not even the kind I _like_ being!” With the emphatic jab of an accusatory finger as he snapped around to continue his pacing, Jason felt an ankle twist, foot slipping over the still-damp bark. A hushed, ungainly whoop escaped from his throat, arms flailing while his entire body perilously tottered and jittered until he managed to reclaim his equilibrium.  
  
And only after a long moment of staring wide-eyed into the open air – his body petrified in its awkward, splayed pose as though waiting for the tree to spitefully buck him off – did he allow himself to relax. The tension oozed out of his muscles, and slowly – ever so slowly – he straightened to warily continue his careful march along the wood.    
  
He would’ve been stupid not to keep his mind on what he was doing now, though. The absolute last thing he needed was to spend the rest of the afternoon was waddling around with an ice-pack pressed to his groin – and that was when he _wasn’t_ picking slivers out of places best left unmentioned.  
  
Staring down at the log with a hushed growl, watching his feet as they moved him steadily back and forth along the wood, Jason committed nothing less than his all to the effort of shunting his most recent flashback to Rori’s debauchery back into the abyss where it belonged. He barely even noticed when Laz froze, eagerly stabbed his nose at something in the foliage, and then bounded off into the green with his tail gaily lashing about behind him – no doubt chasing a rabbit or a mouse or something.  
  
 _Know the feeling, little dude. And I do not envy you one bit.  
  
_ Instead, he turned his mind elsewhere, thoughtfully running his lip between his teeth.      
  
How long had it been since he’d started living here now? Three-quarters of a year sounded about right, maybe a bit more. He had to admit – much as the concept irked him – that it wasn’t all that bad at times. Some of the other tenants were great to hang out with. Of course, there were probably more arguments than there were civil conversations, but still… He had grown to accept them all as family… of a sort. Not exactly family, but something along those lines. Hell, didn’t most people continually harbour the desire to strangle the life from those they were unavoidably related to?  
  
Then again, most people didn’t have decisively smutty thoughts about those people they were unavoidably related to or anything even remotely like that unless there had been one hell of a serious screw-up in the gene pool. And it only took a few moments longer of this thought, adapting and evolving with each second – flashing before his mind’s eye any number of the times Rori had “entertained” him in his bed, sucking, fucking, teasing, toying, fingering, immersing him in the vampire’s own kinky fantasies – before he yanked his hands out of his pockets and smacked the heels of his palms against his temples, a frustrated groan exploding out of his throat.  
  
Who was he fucking kidding? No matter what he did, his mind kept running back to the thought of that damned smutty vampire and clinging to it like his freaking life depended on it!  
  
“What in the hell is _wrong_ with me?!”  
  
If Rori had been there, right at that particular point in time, he probably would have said, “Oh, absolutely nothing, dear one.” Those cool green eyes would have swept appraisingly over Jason’s figure, and a tiny smirk would have touched the corner of his mouth just as a single brow provocatively arched. “Save perhaps for the small fact that you still have your clothes on.” And then he would more than likely take to molesting him again. A slip of the hand here, a light nibble there… the lovely caress of enticing vampire lips stoking a pleasing heat along his veins…  
  
“Ah! No! Abso-fucking-lutely not! _Not_ going there!” His pacing quickened, harried by the thoughts insidiously slinking into his mind as he stuffed his fingers in his ears and cried, “La la la la la, can’t hear y-” One misplaced step, stumble, tangled in his own feet, “Shit, fuck,” too much of an angle, his entire center of balance shifting as gravity hooked its fingers into him and dragged him… _Shiiiiii-_  
  
What he expected was the collision of the hard bed of the earth against his back; what he expected was to have his breath punched out of his chest in a harsh gasp followed by an all-consuming wash of unbridled pain. Instead, after a moment’s inexorable freefall, he felt firm, supple arms looping beneath his shoulders and knees, a sturdy torso crashing against his side… and the only gasp that escaped was one of shock when a familiar, subtly curving smile flickered in his peripheral vision. And, seconds later, was focused into that abominably knee-melting grin of…  
  
Fuck.  
  
His muscles gave another involuntary full-body jerk when the stranger’s identity fully registered an agonizingly short moment later.  
  
“ _Fuck!_ W-what in the hell are you doing here?!” Ah, the skill of conducting intelligent inquisitions. Where would he be without it?  
  
“Saving you, obviously,” the vampire purred, aiming that god-forsaken smile in all of its deviousness point-blank into Jason’s line of sight before Rori’s own began to wander down his body, still cradled tenderly in supernaturally strong arms. “Is this what it takes for me to find you in my arms, dear one? Must I forever skulk in the shadows so that I might once again be proffered the opportunity to save you during a potentially bone-jarring tumble from atop fallen trees? I was rather hoping we could dispense with these tired modern clichés and arrange something slightly more… unique.”  
  
Doing everything in his power to ignore the ripe sarcasm waltzing through Rori’s smooth voice, Jason uncomfortably wriggled against his hold – a feeble attempt, at best, to free himself. Even though the vampire’s arms seemed to be carved from the purest of marbles, they transformed into a pliable, yet steel-solid bond when Jason shifted against them. Pushing his legs downwards made one arm awkwardly sink before it fastened tighter about his knees… and he plainly didn’t trust the vampire enough not to drop him flat on his head if he attempted to move his upper body in anything more vigorous than a discomfited squirm. “You wanna put me down, asshole? You’re creepin’ me out, here.”  
  
That bewitching grin widened just the slightest at the edges as Rori beamed down at him. “Why ever would I want to do that, Jason? After all,” his voice lessened until it was nothing more than a husky whisper as the vampire leaned in, eyes narrowing with a sly smile, “I’ve finally got you just where I want you.”  
  
He responded to the redhead’s smile with a deadpan scowl. “Yeah and you’ll get a fist to the face too if you don’t put me down in two seconds.”  
  
“Feisty…” As Rori’s grin stretched just a scarce bit further – hinting at a small, sharply etched bracket just to the right of his smile – a warm, rolling laugh drifted out of his throat accompanied on the arm of a light-hearted shrug. “As you wish, dear one.” Gracefully bending to set Jason upon his feet, the vampire wasted no time in attempting to trail retreating fingertips along the back of his thigh and the curve of his ass before Jason histrionically danced out of reach with a loud, startled cry of protest.  
  
“Hey hey hey, watch the hands, buddy,” he spat. A single accusatory finger aimed itself directly at the vampire. “I said ‘put me down,’ and nowhere in there was there an offer for a free feel! Back the _fuck_ off.” Pausing for only a moment to pin the grinning immortal with a disgusted and thoroughly exasperated stare, Jason turned on a heel with a hushed “fuck,” muttered under his breath as he sank clawed fingers into his hair. It wasn’t below him, either, to send an occasional wary glance back over his shoulder – just to make sure the pervert wasn’t going to try anything… _nefarious_ while he wasn’t looking.  
  
Instead, Rori complacently tucked long white hands into the pockets of simple black jeans, a broad smile marking pallid lips as he inquisitively cocked his head at him. “Do I really look like one to attempt something nefarious while you’re not paying attention, dear one?”  
  
“Uh, _yes_ ,” Jason retorted. “And for Christ’s sake stop calling me ‘dear one’ already – it’s fuckin’ creepy! Along with the,” his hands histrionically flapped and flailed themselves around for a moment, “ _‘reading of the fucking mind’_ thing – stop it!” Recalling the meagre shreds of his dignity, Jason raked his fingers once more through his hair in aggravation and turned to face the vampire with a testy breath. “Just… Look. What are you doing here, Rori?” There. That time, at least, it managed to come out without the growl. Sort of. Mostly. "Aside from being the same fuckin' creepy-ass stalker as usual."  
  
Alright… maybe not.    
  
Nonetheless, Rori gave nothing more than an innocent blink. (Ha, innocent. Right. Rori O’Connor didn’t possess the physical or mental capacity to even mimic innocence, much less epitomize it. He was the exact opposite. In fact, his likeness was even in the dictionary in the portion of the entry labelled “antonym.”)  
  
“Are you not happy to see me, dear one?”  
  
“What the fuck d’you think, you creep?!” Jason squawked in exasperation. “You’re like the fuckin’ psycho stalker hiding behind the shower curtain with a…” Trailing off in a loss for words as he mimed a classic gesture for stabbing an unsuspecting victim – because ‘stabby-stabby’ certainly wasn’t going to cut it – Jason’s temper only spiked when the vampire completed his sentence with a complacent grin.  
  
“Chef’s knife.”  
  
“ _What_?”  
  
“The knife you’re referring to. It’s called a chef’s knife. A steak knife is smaller and therefore substantially less effective.”  
  
“Well fuck your knives!” He croaked, voice hiking itself up an octave in vexation. “That just makes you a bigger fucking creep with a knife fetish!”  
  
“It only renders me informed, I’m afraid,” the redhead sighed.  
  
“So help me god, I am _one_ _breath_ away from bitch-slapping your ass, vampire...”  
  
“I wouldn’t be entirely opposed to your doing so.”  
  
“Would you just- _Augh!_ ” Jason pivoted away once again, his nerves at their breaking points, searing with aggravation as he dragged hooked fingers down his cheeks. _Fucking_ hell _, why are you so… Aaaaugh!_     
  
Why was it that every time the vampire became involved – in anything – he suddenly became so… overwrought? It was like he was the only man in the world – in the entire universe – with the right fingers to push that certain, secret little button of his, and…  
  
 _Ah, fuck. Fuck me fucking sideways 'til I cry and hey, may as well call me fucking Sally while you’re at it. Jesus Christ, Jason. Way to go, numbnuts. Fuck! Agh! Don’t say fuck._ As he struggled to force back the unwanted mental image his own equally unintentional innuendo had brought to the surface, and the full-body shudder of disgust that so badly wanted to accompany it, the deserted part of Jason’s mentality became uncomfortably and spitefully aware of how Rori’s smirk seemed to have steadily grown wider throughout the whole ordeal. _Fucking smarmy-ass ass-mooching mosquito...!_     
  
Without warning, the vampire vanished, leaving little more than swirling leaves in his wake to mark the place where he’d last stood before he reappeared just as suddenly mere inches away from Jason’s nose. Any sane human being would have naturally backed off a few steps; he was the only one he knew that could have done it so quickly and so vocally. Then again, most sane human beings didn’t have quite the same history with Rori as he did, and that relationship required very, very quick reflexes – disregarding, of course, the fact that those very, very quick reflexes usually rewarded him with absolutely nothing.   
  
After all, as he’d thought time and time again in just another undesirable situation with Rori O’Connor at the helm, there was no ‘flee’ option once vampires were involved.    
  
“I think that deep down, love, part of you is positively euphoric,” The vampire purred, his pallid eyes hinting at the sorts of things that could have made even one’s less-than-respectable harlot blush in shame. Just as those long fingers reached out to lightly brush the back of their knuckles against Jason’s cheek, he flinched away; and Rori, for the first time, allowed his fingers merely to curl in on themselves and withdraw with nothing more than a keen, intrigued cock of the head.  
  
An unsure, yet humourless grin plucked at a single corner of his lips. “Yeah, right, okay. Trust me, you couldn’t be more wrong, Rori,” Jason quietly uttered, voice deep in his throat.  
  
Twin brows arched in humble allowance before the vulpine smile returned. “But would I be wrong in assuming that you’ve been, at the very least, vaguely entertaining the notion of my onesome in your thoughts?” As Jason took another reassuring handful of steps back, his body tense with anxiety and caution, the smile vanished from Rori’s expression and his brows furrowed in concern. “Jason, you’re acting as though I’ve a mind to hurt you.”  
  
 _Because you probably will, in one way or another…_ And any fool who didn’t learn to avoid pain through repeated stimulation of such was dumber than a fucking lab rat. He may not be a genius, but Jason prided himself on exceeding a level as demeaning as that, at least.  
  
 _“Oh…” She drawled with a knowing grin,_ _“So, Jacey-kins… Was Rori gentle?”  
  
_ “I won’t, dear one – I promise.”  
  
 _Liar. You’ve made that promise before._  
  
“Well I’ve no intentions of breaking it this time. Jason –”  
  
“I told you to stay the fuck out of my head, Rori.” Yanking his eyes up from the lush green forest floor to send the marble-skinned immortal a venomous glare from beneath his brows, Jason found his heart racing, his lungs heaving and his hands clenching at his sides as his temper spiralled hotly through his veins. “I’ve told you again, and a-fucking-gain – when d’you plan on listening, dammit?! Or does such a simple request mean so fucking little to you!”  
  
“Jason…” This time, the vampire’s fingers just barely brushed the heating flesh of his cheek before he managed to knock them away with the back of his wrist.  
  
“Don’t _fucking_ touch me, Rori!” Unlike the time before, however, that pallid hand didn’t retreat; it didn’t meekly curl in on itself to leave him be. Instead, it bound his wrist in cold iron fingers before he could react and wrenched him in close, equally yanking a shocked breath out of his chest as he stumbled into the waiting vampire’s chest, an arm looped around his back. “Don’t,” Jason gasped, wincing as Rori held him tight against the Englishman’s motionless body. He could feel his heart beating against the hard surface of Rori’s chest, but there was nothing there to respond in kind. “Don’t…” His plea had disintegrated into but a tiny, shaking breath as spare fingers lightly curved over his flushed cheek, cold against hot – Death, caressing the flesh of the living.  
  
Even as his hands raised themselves against Rori’s shoulders, fingers fisting in the fabric of his shirt in a bid to push him away, the vampire refused to budge. Even though he tensed himself, struggling to shrink away from the immortal’s body, he accomplished nothing. The vampire did nothing more than stare down with those damnably cold eyes into Jason’s own, relentlessly breaking through every barrier he’d ever been able to raise and seeing him, naked, as he was in his soul. Much as Jason yearned to look away, he couldn’t, transfixed by those intense, unblinking pools of glacial green, so pale they could almost pass as white. He could hear nothing, now; not the sound of his breathing, or the hushed song of the birds around them. He could only hear the rapid, throbbing drum of his blood pounding in his ears.  
  
But somewhere deep in his subconscious, he knew when Rori’s lips began looming closer, and it took nothing less than his all to command his head to twitch back from their soft kiss, to turn away even though he knew the vampire’s hand on his jaw would gently guide him back. His lids clenched themselves shut, neck straining to withdraw, at the first feather-light brush against the corner of his mouth; his hands trembled in the vampire’s shirt, flinching even as they held the jet-black cloth in a white-knuckled grip each time contact was made anew.  
  
 _I’m not going to hurt you, Jason. Never again._  
  
The cool, petal-soft lips withdrew, hovering a scant breath away from his own, and when those enthralling green eyes slipped open, reading everything in his soul as though it were inked upon the page of an open book, Jason felt his breath catch. The hard pad of a thumb reverently stroked the corner of his mouth.  
  
“How can it be that you are so beautiful to me, Jason? Everything about you, even the resentment I see in your eyes…” The vampire murmured, lost in his thoughts; those ageless irises trailed meticulously over his face as if in an attempt to absorb and memorize even the slightest of details. Every pore, every minute and utterly human imperfection. Fingers lightly traced his open lips, and Jason fought to swallow past the lodge building itself within his throat. But there it was again, the feeling of not being able to look away, to resist with anything more than a hushed, nearly inaudible utterance in his mind. As the fingertips glided to touch his cheek, Rori leaned in once again to caress Jason’s lips with his own – just lightly, the slightest brush of dead flesh against that of the living.  
  
That didn’t prevent him from noticing just how soft Rori’s lips were, much as he loathed to admit it. Even though the rest of him was as hard as stone, as frozen and unyielding as a statue… His mouth, at least, was soft.  
  
Jason could feel himself slipping away, even as his uneasy mind scrabbled about for something to hold onto. He could feel himself gliding on silken wings towards that appallingly easy to identify oblivion where he didn’t care anymore – not about what had happened between himself and Rori in the past, not about what the others would think, or say, or anything else. It was a place where he could find blissful escape at last from the feelings crashing about in his head like a hurricane, where the only thing that existed was the powerful pull of carnal need… and Rori’s eyes.  
  
Those bewitching, spellbinding green eyes, their ageless depths stretching on into eternity. Two pale celadon pools of color that one could fall into and become lost in ad infinitum without once feeling the pang of regret or remorse. What was it about those eyes that turned Jason’s entire world upside down, and yet offered him a strange sense of peace?  
  
Only half-aware of his surroundings, Jason felt the coarse grit of bark against his back, and the soft, rain-drenched earth beneath him as the vampire straddled his lap, nary an ounce of his weight pressing down upon Jason’s legs. A single large hand cradled his neck while those damnably decadent lips continued their tender, passion-inciting consumption of his own, lightly nudging his mouth open to steal his sigh away. The other lingered restlessly on his cheek before gliding down his throat, over his shoulder, and down his arm to gently take Jason’s fingers from his shirt. He felt the bark against the back of his wrist as the vampire pressed it to the trunk above his head; cool fingertips smoothed themselves over his feverish palm before twining their fingers with his own, reality warping and twisting within the fantasy that had engulfed him and swallowed him whole.  
  
A lifetime of questions spiralled through Jason’s mind, all of them intermingling, tangling together, until he couldn’t decipher one from the other, couldn’t understand anything above the clamour of millions of tiny, ghost-like voices whispering at the same time. He gave up on trying to hear their words, gave up on everything except Rori’s lips.  
  
Fingers spasmed around their fabric prisoner for one fleeting instant before releasing it, sluggishly crawling up and around to tautly rest over the back of the vampire’s smooth, exposed neck. Jason heard a muted moan escape him before he could stop it, mirroring the vampire’s own – saw the blazing outline of Rori’s name in his mind, blinding him to the legions of phantasmal whispers.  
  
 _Rori…_  
  
And suddenly, the muscles beneath his hand tensed just the slightest. The fingers laced together with his tightened.  
  
As though the pressure had triggered some cryptic device within him, Jason leaned forward into the kiss, pouring in just as much frustration as Rori had passion. Perhaps it fell well short of being a comparable emotion, but it rivalled the vampire’s for strength, that much was undeniable.  
  
 _I just don’t fucking care anymore. Use me, if that’s all you’re after._  
  
The hand pressing his against the bark above his crown palpably loosened, and Jason’s own slipped free to bury itself in the vampire’s silky oxblood hair, tilting his head, feasting upon the redhead’s mouth.  
  
 _Just make it feel good, that’s all I’m asking._    
  
The haze of lust coating Jason’s mind in a thick, obscuring blanket began to dissipate when Rori’s lips twitched away – when Rori himself all but froze – and then slowly slipped away entirely. Cloudy chocolate and platinum eyes struggled to flutter open only to see the vampire walking away from him, hands in his pockets once more, his broad, muscular shoulders stiff.  
  
“… Rori?” Jason murmured, his voice thick and choked as he fought to reclaim his grip on reality, using every ounce of strength he had to thrash towards its glimmering surface. The vampire faltered, and all Jason could do was sit there, lost; he watched Rori’s head dip, turning just slightly to the side before his tall, dark figure disappeared entirely in a plume of darkness.  
  
As though he’d never even been there.  
  
 _What the fuck...?_  
  
He didn’t bother looking around to see if, perhaps, Rori would appear somewhere else; he knew the vampire was gone. Instead, he just closed his eyes with a quiet breath and dropped his head back against the tree’s trunk, his heart still hammering against his ribs. Silence reigned with an iron fist for a long moment after that as he remained at the base of the tree, simply breathing and listening to the hush of the vibrant autumn forest. It was when he heard the snort, the impatient stamp of the hoof of a nearby horse, that he forced his eyes open and admitted to himself that he might as well leave. Of course, Rori would have left his horse there – an act of gentlemanly courtesy, no doubt, for the individual he’d left behind.  
  
 _How like him,_ Jason thought with an infinitesimal, bitter smile.  
  
Heaving a breath, he pushed himself to his feet and dusted the leaves from the thoroughly soaked ass of his jeans. Where typically his temper would have flared in annoyance, he did nothing more than sigh. It was hardly something to waste getting worked up over now. Wiping moist hands on the thighs of his jeans, he wearily strode towards the sound of the stallion restlessly shifting in place; Jason allowed only a tiny smile to come to his lips as he held onto the horse’s halter and stroked his nose. Following the line of the reins to the tree where Rori had fastened them, Jason yanked them free of the slipknot, fondly patting Diablo’s powerful neck as the stallion anxiously tossed his head.  
  
“Yeah, yeah… We’re going – chill for a second, would ya?” Jason murmured, hooking a foot awkwardly into the stirrup as he grasped the horn – muttering consolations and curses as Diablo danced aside – and pulled himself up into the saddle. And why did it not surprise him that, even though his legs were shorter than Rori’s, the stirrups had been adjusted to fit him perfectly? Gentleman down to his very core, that man, his thoughts darkly snorted.  
  
 _“How can it be that you are so beautiful to me, Jason?”_  
  
He should have known that Rori would follow him. He should have known that Rori would try to pull another one of his tricks. But he didn’t think that, yet again, even after having gotten what he wanted, after willing Jason into submission, the vampire would completely abandon him.  
  
The discomfort of the saddle, alien terrain to him entirely, was nothing compared to the territory he found his mind stranded in. He’d just have to trust that Diablo, at least, knew his way home. “You’re gonna hafta drive yourself, buddy,” he muttered, mood soured down to his bones by the encounter, reins draped loosely in his fist as the beast shifted restlessly beneath him. “’Cause I _clearly_ don’t know what I’m fucking doing anymore.”     
  
 _Hey, here’s a question: how can it be that you’re such a prick, Rori?_  
  


**-x-**

  
“Ohmigawd, food! Ohmigawd ohmigawd ohmigawd! Julian, you are a _saint_! That’s it! I’m building a closet-shrine for you! With flowers and a statue and little cosmopolitan sea-monkeys and everything-!”  
  
“I think you mean ‘metropolitan’-”  
  
“Artemis, calm down before you upset the whole table!”  
  
“But I’m _hungry_!”  
  
“Well that’s what you get for sitting on the computer for more than a day without eating anything and trying to hack into… whatever it is that is _so_ worth hacking into.”  
  
Emphatically waving around a piece of roast beef that she’d skewered with her fork, still sluggishly dripping gravy onto her plate, Artemis pinned the sorceress with a narrow-eyed stare. “Yeah, well, if you were in my position, trying to hack the _bank_ ,” she ardently stuffed the first forkful into her mouth, “you’d do the same. Can’t leave it for a minute until the job’s done.”  
  
Yami rolled crimson eyes as he shook his head; he returned to tranquilly lifting portions of salad onto his plate, which, typically enough, remained absolutely and completely devoid of any and all meat-like substances. It was a shame, really – the poor boy could use a little extra flesh on his bones, Julian mused, chin propped wistfully on the heel of his palm. He was so skinny already…  
  
“Of course,” the half-breed sardonically drawled. “Because it’s just that important, is it, this surge of money worth starving yourself over?”  
  
“Um… yes.” Artemis shortly fired back. Yue, sitting quietly beside their ruby-eyed friend, failed in completely stifling her snort of skeptical laughter; Artemis pointed her fork at the sorceress for a second time. “Hey, it’s true okay, so don’t you start with me. Money is always worth the suffering and I don’t plan on being caught anytime soon so you can just stuff it. Bunny plug for you.”  
  
“Then maybe, if you really do intend on remaining free and out of prison, you should stop being a thief, and a hacker, and everything else that’s likely to get you arrested. Ever think o’ that?” Morgan archly retorted, brows raised in mild boredom and a faint, dry smile on her lips as she delicately sawed through a small slab of fragrant, tender meat. “Can’t do the time if you don’t do the crime.”  
  
Artemis blinked at her for a moment, and then, testily stabbing up another pre-cut piece of meat, gave it a sharp emphatic jab in her direction. “To stop high-score/high-risk stealing, Morgan, is like stopping smoking. Easier said than done.” She filled her mouth once more with relish and exuded the satisfied air of someone deeming the argument firmly in their capable hands.  
  
“And I suppose you’d have experience in both. After all, from one addictive habit to another, right?”  
  
That, however, crossed the line, and Julian gave a quiet little sigh of suppressed dismay as he bowed his head and hid behind his hand as he kneaded his brow, recognizing all too well the words that signified the beginnings of a potentially volatile quarrel. Morgan was quite a sweet girl when she wanted to be, he knew this for a fact, but he also couldn’t deny that there were simply times when she was just too blunt and contrary for her own good… And could occasionally do with a slightly more reliable filter between her brain and her mouth.    
  
Artemis, for her part, looked positively livid as she slapped her cutlery down, an exceptionally rare display of a temper that had left more than one nose bloody in the past. “What’s that supposed to mean, you, you fucking… _Du Fickfehler_?!”  
  
Luckily, Morgan couldn’t understand German to comprehend precisely what Artemis had called her, but the brunette twitched at what could only be an insult all the same, red rising into her ashen face and her dark eyes going black as coal. Before anything disastrous could occur before the wide, observant eyes of the rest of the Manor’s tenants, however, Julian cut in, uneasily smiling and fanning a long hand down the course of the spacious cherry-wood dinner table at them.  
  
“She didn’t mean anything by it, love, just enjoy your supper, all right?”  
  
The two girls went back to their business, shooting glares of a long-run irritation at each other; russet irises locked with amber, the venomous miasma radiating within them promising to one another that the affront wasn’t one that would be hastily discarded as Artemis softly hissed through her teeth at the brunette. Oh no, neither of them would forgive such insults so readily, but even so…  
  
Breathing a relieved sigh that yet another dispute had been settled – for the moment, at least – before anyone got hurt, Julian continued. “Oh, by the way, does anyone know where Rori and Jason might be?” Long, dainty fingers lightly touched at soft lips in thought, “I don’t think I’ve seen either of them hardly all day.”  
  
“Ah, they’re probably just, uh…” Grey-blue irises sent a fleeting glance at the wide-eyed blonde child sitting across the table. “Messin’ around…” Kali finished, eyes wide, innocently drawling the euphemism out with a shrug as she poked at a sprig of parsley. “Y’know… knocking boots? Bed-sheet boom-time?”  
  
Faith, sitting just to the left of her friend, sent her a bewildered emerald glance as Potatoe curiously inquired about their reason for knocking boots together. “They seem to be doin’ quite a lot of that lately, don’t they?”  
  
“Yeah, but personally I’d rather not think about it, thanks all the same. I’d like to keep whatever’s remaining of my food in my stomach, instead of in the toilet.”  
  
“Still feelin’ a mite sickly from yesterday, are we?”  
  
“Yup,” Kali confirmed with a wry grin, twin dark brows arching in false enthusiasm before she retrieved her water glass and lifted it to her lips. Faltering before she managed to take a drink, however, she crankily muttered, “And having to chase Rori around the property earlier today certainly didn’t friggin’ help.”  
  
“Aw, muffin.”  
  
“Oh stuff it, Artemis.”  
  
The German, in reply, made a rather spectacular and vocal show of gobbling up more of her dinner, promptly earning herself several pointedly repulsed demands to stop, and a poorly stifled giggle from the Manor’s youngest inhabitant.  
  
Julian made a small noise in his throat, thoughtfully frowning down at his plate while the others continued eating – and bickering, he wearily noticed – and yet, he remained barely even aware of it all. _I wonder where they’ve run off to now… Rori I suppose is understandable, but it’s not like Jason to miss a meal, and certainly not supper._ A small smile tugged at his lips at the sudden thought of the way the muse would sometimes loiter about the kitchen, eyes alight as he inquired at multitudinous intervals when dinner would be ready. _He’s far too much of a glutton for that._

 

**-x-**

  
Heaving another pitiful whine into the subdued atmosphere of his bedroom as he flopped onto his side, Jason fought with all of his might to ignore the way his stomach unleashed its hundredth growl of warning before it resumed obstinately gnawing on his spinal column. It had definitely given up on him voluntarily feeding it, and thus had apparently deemed the time fit to resort to cannibalism; and he had to admit that while it wasn’t pleasant by a long-shot, well… Things could certainly be worse. Another guttural rumble – followed by a rather curious clicking mixture of noise and sensation, like his stomach were an overheated engine cooling in mid-winter – felt it was appropriate to disagree with him.  
  
Thanks to Morgan’s arrival, and that absolutely infuriating comment she’d made, he’d forgotten about breakfast entirely. Add on the effects of the hike through the forest, and suddenly, seven hours later without even so much as a snack, he supposed it was understandable for his gut to be so unusually cross with him.   
  
Christ, he could almost smell the food down the hall. The scents were wafting beneath the crack of his door like a large, phantasmal hand – the manifestation of his stomach’s relentless, and rather obnoxiously articulated demands for food – seductively beckoning to him, guiding him, trying to lure him out of his messy bedroom. Trying to lure him out to where Rori was.  
  
Well, fuck that. Jason wasn’t going anywhere near that rat-eyed bastard. Yeah, that’s right; his eyes were ugly, and glowed in the dark. _An' I mean, what the fuck. That's just_ creepy.  
  
He’d gotten him all worked up that afternoon in the woods, and then he’d just _deserted_ him like some random hunch of meat he’d decided to take a taste of before snubbing entirely. So if the vampire was expecting some kind of gratification from him like he always did, Jason wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of actually getting it. (Not voluntarily, anyways.)  
  
Getting him all hot and bothered, and then rejecting him, of all the things to do, just when Jason finally showed signs of accepting the vampire’s advances! Regardless of the fact that he’d accepted them only on some ludicrous and outright farcical level driven more likely than not by pure sexual frustration, it was still accepting them all the same, right? Right. Then what was he? One of those perverted freaks that could only get off if their partner was unwilling? He knew that wasn’t true, so… Well, okay, maybe he didn’t, considering the circumstances. He was fairly certain that it wasn’t and couldn’t be true – although, if the vampire had no qualms with manipulating _him_ against his will, wouldn’t that also imply that he’d be perfectly willing to do it to others?  
  
Oh, to hell with it… Just…  
  
What the _fuck_!  
  
As the thought of the early afternoon’s incident continued to swirl about in his mind, contaminating everything that it touched with a volatile mixture of vexation and humiliation, Jason heaved a frustrated groan into the silence of his bedroom, shifting his head and dropping his face down into his sheets with a quiet growl rumbling in his throat. Why _was_ it that he suddenly gave in, anyways? It couldn’t be because…  
  
 _"Please!”  
  
_ No, of course not. That was stupid. But then… Why did he actually kiss Rori back? For the sense of release? That couldn’t have been it.  
  
Overcome by confusion and resignation, he tilted his cheek onto his blankets and stared morosely, lost in thought, at the gunmetal blue surface of his wall.  
  
Jason knew he had enough options available for releasing pent-up sexual frustration with women; the fact that his band’s performances pretty much guaranteed them sycophantic, love-struck fangirls was a testament to that. There were nights when they practically had to beat the more amorous of their female fans off with a stick, so if he really was frustrated in that sense after all, he could’ve easily dealt with it there and then. The problem was that, particularly in the most recent months, he hadn’t experienced even an ounce of desire to do so.  
  
It wasn’t that he didn’t find his female admirers attractive – because more often than not, he did. He liked their ragged, punky hair, teased, choppy, spiked, and coloured unnaturally; his eyes were forever wandering, drawn to their alluring piercings, and the elegant, elaborate tattoos staining their skin. In the dark, neon-drenched atmosphere of the nightclub, he’d always drank in the sight of their slender bodies garbed in clothing that was just as black as it was fluorescent, their tops as close-fitting as their tattered skirts or bondage pants were baggy. He loved their fiery attitudes and voracious thirst for all things unaccepted and unconventional.    
  
But lately, instead of gorging himself on the attention of his female fans, he’d been finding that release in ways that could remain isolated within the walls of his bedroom or bathroom, with himself as their sole occupant, and his hands as his partner.  
  
If he began feeling frustrated, he dealt with it; it was as simple as that, and yet… The sudden lack of interest in women just didn’t seem _right,_ somehow. He knew he was still attracted to them; every trip down to the pool with the girls reassured him of that, particularly if Faith happened to be with them at the time.  
  
Hell, it was virtually impossible _not_ to indulge himself by stealing appreciative glances whenever he figured he might be able to get away with it. After all, Faith was – for lack of a better term – the most curvaceous girl in residence. She was strong, but feminine, all broad hips and ample breasts, with the kind of athletic, titillating hourglass figure Jason couldn’t help but love. It was hard not to, with the way the Irishwoman carried herself. She was gorgeous – with alabaster skin, full lips, cascading lengths of rippling chestnut and copper hair – and she knew it. Never mind the fact that she had a healthy appreciation for all things of vehicular design, happened to be the most mechanically gifted individual in the Manor, and possessed a tongue sharper than any whip, because those were just gratuitous bonuses...  
  
Except for the unwelcome reality that involved Faith’s habit of frequently reminding Jason of his rather low station in life, often with elaborately articulated threats to reinforce said reminders.      
  
The point was – and Jason would sooner eat his own balls than admit it to the Irishwoman’s face for fear of the no doubt hellish repercussions – Faith was the kind of girl that often dominated the lead role in his fantasies, the very same ones Rori had hinted at the night before. It was just another reason as to why this was all so utterly and unspeakably _alien_ to him. He liked women – the curvy ones like Faith, all across the spectrum to the sinuous elfin willows like Artemis. So why…?  
  
Jason’s torso wilted as a frail breath leaked out from within the confines of his chest, lids drooping over hazy, mismatched eyes as he cushioned his head on his folded arm.  
  
He hadn’t realized before now that his own mind was capable of being so goddamn confusing; he didn’t have a single clue as to what he was thinking, or what was motivating him, driving him unstoppably towards the actions he would inevitably take. There were so many possibilities, but then, there existed reasons that contradicted those, and others contradicting the ones already contradicting his first thoughts that plain and simply contradicted every other thought he had, and…  
  
Oh, fuck it. To hell with the whole thing, he just wouldn’t think about it. Shove it to the back of his mind and forget all about it – ignore the fact that Rori had kissed him so passionately in the woods, that he had been so close… The feeling of his hand gliding down his arm, his fingertips caressing his palm in just the right way to make his heart skip a beat…  
  
 _‘Just make it feel good.’_  
  
Eyes snapping open, Jason felt heat rushing up through his neck, and as soon as he realized it, he jerked up, clapping his hands to his cheeks in horror. No! He wasn’t actually… he _couldn’t_ be…!  
  
Hurtling off of his bed, he sprinted into his bathroom, skidding to a halt on the tile in front of the sink and slapping on the light to see…  
  
No! He was blushing! _Blushing_! Blushing over that overgrown ass-leeching man-lecher!  
  
Frozen in sheer terror, Jason could do nothing more than watch, appalled, as yet more crimson flushed his countenance, quickly turning his ears blood red with heat.  
  
“Dammit, no...!” Stumbling back into his room, clutching desperately at the sides of his head as though such a simple gesture would change anything, Jason flopped down on his bed; remaining blissfully oblivious to the fact that he nearly smacked his skull into the wall in the process, he buried his face into his sheets. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, _no_...!” He moaned. “It’s Rori, for Christ’s sake! _Rori_! Why in the fucking hell are you blushing over _Rori_?! He’s a fucking horny, condescending, arrogant, pompous, sick, twisted, sadistic vampyric bastard that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about anything but his own fucking dick and _sticking it in something_! Ass-mooching mosquito, remember?!” The strained query ended in a high-pitched squeak of distress.  
  
 _Then why do you keep fantasizing about him, huh?  
  
It’s not fantasizing – it’s thinking! Last I recall that was a perfectly normal, sane human thing to be doing!_  
  
But that conniving little voice continued as though it hadn’t heard a thing. _And in such detail too… Answer me that, genius. If it's just thinking, then why do you pore over the little things, huh? Why do you always pay so much attention to the tiny details of everything, and, hell, that aside... If it's just thinking, why do you keep dwelling on how good he makes you feel when he's-_  
  
Hands clutching at his head, Jason buried his face further into his covers. “La-la-la I can’t hear you…!” Inhaling deeply through his nose and releasing it in a heavy gust, Jason froze as an eerily familiar scent registered. Blinking, a brow quirked in confusion, he thrust himself up onto his elbows and cautiously lifted the blanket in question to his face.  
  
“What the -” Another sniff, bringing the faded, but unmistakable scent of a recognizable cologne to him… Rori’s smell. The smell of musk, and the faint underlying aroma of something akin to vanilla. Brows furrowed, dark and light irises flitted across the blanket fibres as though his answers would be there, entangled in the threads; he stared at it for only a moment longer before vehemently shoving the comforter away.  
  
Bastard. Sick fucking son of a cheap Irish whore. What kind of fucking poof of a man smelled like _vanilla,_ anyways? Sure, it was a pleasant enough fragrance, and it wasn’t like he’d never snuck a reverent sniff or two – or three or four, or as many as he could possibly get before someone caught him at it and began questioning his already dodgy mental state – of the vanilla extract Julian happened to use in his baking, but it just wasn’t _normal_ for a man to smell like that by default. Up until he’d met Rori, he hadn’t thought it was even humanly _possible_ to smell like vanilla, and yet the vampire did… All the goddamn time!  
  
Spurred no doubt by such a sweet, cloying fragrance and the notion of the baked goods that so often accompanied it, Jason’s stomach keened again in insistence that it not be forgotten. And then, as though on cue, there came but three light knocks on his door – and since there was no one else in the room, he could tell himself all he wanted that he hadn’t jumped at the sound of them and then, maybe, it would come true. Well, hell, technically speaking it _was_ the truth since no one else was there. In that moment, he was essentially the cat in the box of Schrödinger’s Cat. Was the cat dead, or alive? Did Jason jump or remain still? In reality, before the box was reopened, only he knew the true answer.   
  
Christ, if he was starting to put himself inside mind-bending thought experiments, he was in desperate need of a break from his own head for a bit.  
  
 _Must be Julian. No one else in this whole friggin’ house knocks. Especially not Rori, 'cause y'know since he's so cool and this is his house it automatically means he can just waltz right in and..._ Fuck _he pisses me off._ Nonetheless, Jason’s visitor had knocked, which meant it was safe to open the door instead of crawling back into a corner to curl into the fetal position and sit there rocking like a neurotic, overwrought mental patient – which was exactly what he really wanted to do.  
  
Instead, rolling off of his bed, Jason carefully picked his way through his over-large bedroom, wary of stepping on anything fragile lurking within the spots of clutter underfoot as shambled over to the door.    
  
“Hell- Ohh...” But his voice trailed off as he tugged the door open, eyes drastically widening when he saw the devil himself lingering just on the other side, casual as could be, with a single forearm lifted against the doorframe as a brace for the rest of his body to lean on. “Shit,” Jason finally concluded in a flat mumble. “Rori, what are you doing here.”  
  
Of course, the man had the gall to stand there smiling at him like they were the best of friends, a silver platter carrying a plate laden with food balanced in his elegant hand. Were it not for the fact that Jason’s brain had yet to be severed from the rest of him by the valiant efforts of his gnawing stomach, he would have accepted the “good will to all mankind” gesture and given into the redheaded immortal’s stunt. Thankfully, however, that was not the case. Damned vampire… Trying to pull the wool over his eyes with – Well, it did smell awfully…  
  
 _No! Do not give in to the enemy’s cheap voodoo/Jedi mind tricks!_  
  
Instead… Why did the man’s complexion have to resemble that of a fifteenth century marble statue? Why? A mental image of Michelangelo’s David came to mind in all of its unclothed glory, soon transforming into the vampire’s familiar form with that same damnable smirk on his delectable lips and sans any of the Renaissance’s conventions in regards to depicting the size of male genitalia. _Gah, stupid fucking piece of shit backstabbing brain. Focus, Jason… Focus.  
_  
Damn that food smelled good. Yorkshire pudding drowning in gravy and sweet, tender roast beef and-  
  
 _No…_ His mind firmly drawled, seizing the head of his attention span in both hands to resolutely steer it in the direction of the target he desperately needed it to concentrate on. _Focus.  
  
_ _Bu-but... Pudding!_ His stomach childishly whimpered.  
  
The vampire simply continued to smile at him, shrugging one of his fine, broad shoulders as he hefted the platter in indication. “I thought that you might perhaps find yourself feeling a mite peckish, given that you failed to make an appearance at the dinner table.”  
  
 _Yeah, and for good reason._ For the second time, Jason had to force his eyes away from the plate of food poised directly in his line of sight. _There has to be more to it than that. I know there is – there has to be. You’re not just here to feed me. Nothing with you is ever that simple._  
  
“Oh I can assure you, that’s really all that I had in mind, darling – feeding you. And nothing naughty, either, for that matter.” Rori merely blinked when Jason glared at him, making a move to shut the door and mentally cursing – both foully and repeatedly – when the vampire easily held it open with a single digit, giving a lacklustre, worn-down sigh as he rolled his eyes. “Yes, I know: ‘don’t read my mind’, yes? Terribly sorry.”  
  
Jason snorted with an irate sneer. “Yeah. Sure you are.”  
  
“You don’t believe me?”  
  
 _You don’t think that’s a gimme?_ “Why should I? You lie through your teeth all the time about day-to-day shit – why should an apology be any different?” Jason muttered pointedly. Well, it wasn’t just his temper talking this time, at least; there was a facet of truth in it. After all, the vampire did tend to lie on a regular basis – where ‘regular’ translated to ‘more frequently than should be mentally possible without meriting one the label of a pathological liar.’ Mostly, it seemed to happen when the vampire said he’d be gentle, and then, amazingly, he’d ‘accidentally’ allow his ‘passion’ to get the better of him. Lying sack of other people’s blood. Ass-mooching mosquito. Jason really prided himself on his ingenuity with that one.  
  
“I was telling the truth when that happened, dear one, and I did patch you up again after all, didn’t I?” Rori murmured, his face stern and dark for only the most fleeting of moments before the disconcerting expression drifted away. “Doesn’t that at least count for something?”  
  
“No.” Jason shoved his weight against the door again, only for his feet to slide backwards on the wooden floor. Screw the food. It was probably drugged, and even if it wasn’t, he didn’t want to get it from Rori. Besides, he’d called him ‘dear one’, and that never boded well. His stomach could live with cannibalism for now, thank you.  
  
The vampire sighed, effortlessly holding the door in place until Jason heaved a breath and heavily leaned on it with a moody frown of resignation. _Cheap fucking mind-reading cheater._  
  
“Now, really love, you’re being just a mite childish, don’t you think?” Rori murmured, tipping his head forward. “If I wasn’t dead then I would taste the food myself just to prove to you that I haven’t _drugged_ it.” It was amazing how one who dealt with things like that on a daily basis – mostly using them on other people – could say a word with such blatant distaste as Rori rolled pallid green eyes.  
  
Green still, Jason noted. Green was good. Red was bad; very, very bad. Lusty red was extremely bad, so green was very good indeed. _Red means stop, green means go._ Jason almost laughed at himself, wondering if they ever turned yellow for that split second before going red. His thoughts were so muddled, he was sure they must be bordering on the verge of hysteria by now, but he was so far from caring – and so goddamn hungry – that he didn’t even notice. Maybe his stomach had made more headway on his spinal cord than he’d realized.  
  
“But I _am_ dead, therefore that defeats the whole purpose of my even bringing it up, now doesn’t it? All I can do is give you my word, and if you don’t trust my word, well…”  
  
Jason snorted again. _Yeah, and your word is worth, what? The standard price of those condoms you get out of bathroom dispensers?_ Nonetheless, he sighed, resigning to simply asking Rori outright. “Look, just… Why are you really here? And no cryptic mumbo-jumbo Shakespearean bullshit this time, either.”  
  
He watched, slightly dumbfounded, when the vampire failed to answer immediately. Correction: when he didn’t even so much as smirk. Instead, the vampire took a breath, brows twitching lower, eyes wandering off to the side in thought, perhaps even considering how exactly to phrase what he had on his mind. Which, of course, could be either for the better or worse. Jason, personally, was praying for the former.  
  
“Jason, I wanted to... _talk_ to you,” the immortal began slowly, chewing on every word before it passed through his lips. His voice did seem softer after having gone through such a process, carefully devoid of hidden innuendos or the husky tone of his natural Don Juan leaking through, and Jason couldn’t help but stand there and stare as his brows shot up in surprise.  
  
Well, that was new. Talking. And Rori never said anything about wanting to fuck his brains out and then make a feeble attempt at pillow talk afterwards. After all, it was terribly difficult to try and be civil after a sexual encounter one didn’t essentially want and then finding out afterwards that one can hardly move thanks to the vigorous insertion and piston-like thrusting of-  
  
 _'Kay, Brain? Let’s just not go there right now, if you wouldn’t mind, plzkthx._  
  
“Talk…” Jason carefully, if somewhat skeptically, repeated in a drawl.  
  
“Yes, about…” Glacial celadon eyes glanced at the tray in the immortal’s hand before they returned to his face. “Perhaps matters would be simplified if we spoke in your bedroom. You can eat while I try to deliberate how it would be best to phrase this, and, well...” A slightly sheepish grin plucked at the corners of Rori’s supernaturally flawless mouth. “I suppose there’s no point in having you starve to death in the doorway, is there? I can see that you’re famished.”  
  
Jason’s red flag went up at the vampire’s first words, and… how in the hell was it possible for anyone to make ‘I can see that you’re famished’ suddenly sound so, god forbid, _sexual_?! How?! Or was that just another one of the things Rori practiced in the gilt-framed mirror in his dark bedroom when he thought no one was watching? Had to be. How else could anyone become as articulate as he had, save for hours upon hours and years upon years of practice on something?  
  
Then again, given how many years of experience Rori had in bed-hopping – a whole whopping four hundred and twenty-something… Who needed mirrors?  
  
In spite of all of this, however – as well as common sense – Jason warily pulled the door open in invitation, keeping a keenly narrowed, suspicious eye on the vampire at all times as he slipped through the doorway with a hushed, “Much obliged.” He didn’t want the blood-sucking bastard in his room any more than absolutely need be, but he was curious to hear what it was that had the smooth-talking Rori O’Connor verbally stumbling over himself like that.  
  
Watching Rori as he carefully cleared a space on Jason’s makeshift nightstand – composed of nothing more than a simple hard-paneled stool – Jason pushed the door shut with his foot, and cautiously stared at the vampire staring back at him as the man set aside his burden and sat down near the foot of the equally makeshift bed. He knew what Rori was eyeing _him_ for, but Jason wanted to make sure that he wasn’t going to be in danger any time soon; luckily enough, subtle nuances in Rori’s body language betrayed these moments most times, and now, for the time being, Jason allowed himself to relax.  
  
That was, until the earlier afternoon flashed in his mind. Until he felt part of himself yielding to the sensory memory of Rori’s mouth. Again.  
  
 _'Just make it feel good.’_  
  
Trying to ignore that debacle to the best of his abilities, Jason crossed the room, flopping down onto his bed by his pillow, folding his legs into a pretzel-like position while leaning back comfortably on his elbows, hands laced across his diaphragm. For some reason, when Rori’s eyes scanned over him just then, he let them, no reprimand, bad thought or otherwise slipping through his mind in vexation. The only thought was to let him. Let him see what he wouldn’t get without a fight.  
  
Then, to completely and totally go fuck-nut with the state of mind he’d had earlier, another side of him actually wanted the vampire’s eyes on him – his body had the inexplicable, nigh insane urge to tease the man. He knew that Rori considered him some sort of delicious eye-candy. No reason not to play on it, since the vampire plucked at his emotional strings with the same disdain at times.  
  
 _Quick, before you do something stupid!_ “So, uh…” Jason drawled, scratching at the flesh staple piercing his left brow. “What did you wanna say?”  
  
Rori looked away, taking a moment to clear his throat and visibly gather himself.  
  
 _Yeah, that’s right. I’m a distraction, aren’t I? Not even doing anything, and I'm distracting the fuck out of you._ The vicious satisfaction of a ruthless smile diffused itself throughout his mind. _Serves you right, you arrogant bastard._ If the vampire read his thoughts, he made no sign of it – something that was unusual at best, and fan-fucking-tabulously creepy once his habitually whiplash-quick retorts were taken into consideration.    
  
“Forgive me.”

 

**-x-**

  
Rori paid keen attention from his peripheral vision as Jason’s brows shot up, eyes widening dramatically in surprise; only for the moment, however, had his words seemed to leave the boy speechless.  
  
With the way the muse was sitting – knees spread flat on the bed with his ankles crossed, leaning back on his elbows with his pillow cushioning the small of his back, head cocked nearly onto his shoulder – his carefully, oh so painfully _meticulously_ collected thoughts had been relentlessly scattered by a ferocious, searing explosion of lust like loose papers in a blast of hurricane-force winds. Jason had after all been so very, terribly correct about being a distraction. Every thought he’d possessed had been functionally disintegrated and replaced with a burning desire to simply crawl over the eighteen-year-old youth and take him for his own – just as he’d done countless times before, whether Jason was compliant or not.  
  
Perhaps that was what gave him the sudden, sinking feeling that had prompted the two tiny words to pass though his lips like air, almost inaudible to even his own sensitive ears.  
  
All the same, even with this notion taken into careful consideration, Rori’s devious thoughts envisioned him apologizing yet again, this time touching the brunette’s cheek, slipping a hand over the back of his neck, leaning in to brush against those tempting lips, prompting a soft, gentle moan from his darling, seductively rugged muse’s throat…  
  
‘twas nothing more than a desperate man’s fantasy, that something like that should happen and especially for the muse to simply… “take it lying down,” as some said nowadays. But then, that fantasy had passed, if somewhat mangled, earlier that day. Perhaps it would see fit to come again.  
  
As soon as the thought clung to his mind, he thrust it roughly aside. Jason had been acting oddly then, and he seemed more than clear-headed now. To attempt something like that… It was nothing short of heinous, and would only serve to reinforce whatever horrid preconceptions the muse already had about him. That was, he was without a doubt, the absolute last thing he wanted. He was supposed to be apologizing for the time he’d already taken advantage of the boy, for God’s sake – not trying to find some alternative way to do it again!    
  
 _And yet…_  
  
Jason’s brows furrowed in a confused frown and with his voice, his beautiful, entrancing voice, blatantly raising itself with caution, the muse finally inquired, “Sorry?”  
  
“I’m sorry, Jason. Please, if you could find it in your heart to forgive me…” Although as Rori whisked himself out of his thoughts, he recognized all too clearly the demon rearing in the back of his mind – the same demon, might he add, that never failed to find itself with the reins to his actions in its nefarious palm. And that demon opted most obstinately not to change its ways now, simply because part of him demanded that it stay its hand.  
  
With another glance sliding over the muse’s form, he felt that creature within roughly jostle him aside and step eagerly into the shape of his body; with sad resignation, Rori could do nothing but watch on helplessly from the back of his mind. _Jason, I am sorry…_  
  
“Sorry for what?”  
  
“For this afternoon – it was out of line, and deplorable of me aside, to take advantage of you the way I did.” _Yet you plan on doing it again._ There was another brief mental chuckle that resided totally and completely apart from his own, rife with amusement. _What a demon I am. But a clever demon nonetheless.  
  
Manipulative, you mean.  
  
Oh, but that sounds so…_ callous, his doppelganger’s voice purred in roguish glee. _I’m not hurting anyone after all, am I? Simply… expressing my affections.  
  
In all the wrong ways, you fiendish cur._    
  
Jason’s face shifted with recollection, and, by the look in his brown and platinum eyes, Rori got a feeling that he’d caused something to resurface that the musician desperately preferred to keep buried. Running a hand through his short hair, ragged cheekbone-length bangs carelessly parted were pulled back from his face, even if only for an instant, before they escaped to messily flop back into place. That instant was long enough to incite in Rori an almost overwhelming desire to brush his hair back from his forehead, to press yearning kisses to his brow, lid, cheek… Jason’s tongue darted out to wet his lips in a rather erotic, albeit unintentional display, and the muse thoughtfully caught his lower lip between his teeth for only the briefest of moments before he released it once more.  
  
Ye god, how Rori longed to kiss those sweet, succulent lips.  
  
 _You know not what you do to me, Jason, but please, I beg you to stop._  
  
The teen fidgeted for a few minutes, rubbing a hand over his mouth, under his nose, his gaze sliding about the room, seemingly looking anywhere and everywhere except for at him, a slight flush tinting his cheeks and, more noticeably yet, his ears. It was a sweet, unconscious gesture his body extended, and Rori couldn’t help but to give in to the smile it brought to his lips. His actions reminded him of a shy virgin’s reaction to a libidinous being such as himself blatantly asking them to his bed. And he would indeed recognize that, considering he’d executed such a tactic more than once. He'd bedded and deflowered many virgins over the span of his life, and by the Gods... he never tired of them. Such unbridled, newfangled lust they carried within them, shy and awkward and oh so very _hungry…_  
  
Finally, the muse spoke up again, raising his shoulder in a futile, but endearing, mockery of a careless shrug as he idly shook his head. “Whatever, man, whatever. Just don’t do it ag-”  
  
Oh, bugger it all.  
  
“Wai– Rori, what’re you-”  
  
The urges, desires, yearnings having overcome him, he fluidly closed the distance between them, hungrily capturing the muse’s lips, parted in shock; he seized the opportunity to slip his tongue in, caressing the velveteen muscle stunned into immobility in Jason’s hot, wet mouth. Rori allowed his body to press just lightly down upon the muse’s, relishing the pliable feel of him beneath him, taken off-guard for that one brief instant. Lust clouded his inhumanly sharp vision until he gave in, letting his lids slip shut, changing the angle of the kiss, delving deeper and deeper until his efforts were rewarded with a subtle moan from Jason’s throat.  
  
Only distantly did he feel the teen’s body tense beneath him, hands pressing against his shoulders. Giving in to desire, Rori skimmed a hand down Jason’s taut, exquisitely muscled chest, trailing over the ribbed black fabric of his shirt before slipping under the hem to caress the heated flesh of his stomach, gliding in adoration over his side. Dauntless fingers ghosted up the teen’s torso to tease a nipple that quickly hardened to erection under the attentive caress of his touch. And for just that one, fleeting moment, the tension in Jason’s muscles melted away, leaving him temptingly vulnerable, his figure docile beneath the weight of Rori’s own body as he moaned once more…  
  
The cloud was only too soon to vanish when Jason jerked his head back; lips clamped shut, face red, mismatched eyes furious, his anger mixing dangerously with another deep, well-hidden and unreadable emotion. Roughly snatching the hand out of his shirt, Jason shoved his arm back, and, seeing where this new encounter was going, Rori bowed his head in resignation, willing himself into a fine mist that quickly vanished, seeping into the walls, leaving the frustrated teen alone in his room.  
  
 _Fine way to fuck it up again, you great satyromaniacal leech._

 

**-x-**

  
Jason glared at the spot he’d last seen Rori before the vampire dissolved into thin air once again. Again! He’d known that was going to happen. Known Rori would show up and start spouting all of this bullshit about how he was so sorry, and then he’d go and do the same thing he was originally apologizing for in the first place!  
  
For some reason, the reality of how far Jason had let him get this time infuriated him. It made him feel so weak, so goddamn _easy_! True, the vampire had amazing hands, a breathtaking mouth, body, all of it – speaking strictly in the sense of aesthetics, mind, never sexual attraction – and was more than skilled with how to use them, but the fact that Jason was so effortlessly swayed, even for an instant, was not only frustrating but degrading.  
  
And, just like the last time, watching the vampire disappear without a word left that twisted little part of him that had yearned for his touch feeling bitterly despondent.  
  
Growling to himself with renewed aggravation, Jason doubled over and clutched at his head. How could he actually lose himself in that?! Why did he just sit there and let Rori move in on him like he expected him to take it lying down?! And he fucking well almost did, for Christ’s sake! As the growling increased in volume, so did Jason’s confusion.  
  
What was it that made him go completely weak around the vampire? He didn’t get it! He hated Rori for what the vampire put him through – he hated him with the entirety of his being and more – and yet… yet…  
  
He groaned, hands loosening on the clumps of hair they had tightened around, slipping away from his head to limply fall onto his blankets into a weary, lost state of confusion. The same blankets, Jason remembered, that smelled so achingly similar to Rori; the scent that reminded him of the vampire’s smile for the slightest of moments when it had been without that fiendish undertone, when it had truly seemed sincere and innocent.  
  
After a prolonged period of time spent brooding within the depths of his mind, Jason became aware of how his torso was heatedly tingling with the fresh remembrance of how those achingly talented hands had touched him, warming with the memory of the vampire’s body pressed against his own.  
  
 _‘Just make it feel good.’_  
  
And for the last time, his stomach gave a petulant, demanding growl that it be fed.  
  


**-x-**

To Be Continued…

**-x-**

 

 **So, like it? Hate it? Wish it would spontaneously combust? Leave me a review and tell me all about it! C’mon, I wanna know _everything!_ –maniacal cackle-  
**  
You know, I've been working on this rewrite for a long time, but this chapter has always,  _always_ given me a hard time. I think I've finally gotten it to a point where I'm okay with it, though. Only took forever, but better late than never, I suppose. Hopefully, going forward, the other chapters will be a little more forgiving and therefore result in a faster upload time. Hope everyone liked it! Lemme know what you think!  


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